The Atheist God
by IA Seldon
Summary: "I am the beating heart at the center of the swirling oblivion, come to visit nightmare upon all who cross my path. I am the thing that Was and the thing that Is and the terror that will ever be..." -Shinji Ikari. Chapter 6 now up.
1. In Media Res

_{Sotto Voce}_

_This is the show that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. We fight at noon and die at night, just don't cry for me all right? Tomorrow is another day, so drink up and go play. For this is the show that never ends. It just goes and and on, my friends._

_[Repeat]_

_-_Battle Song of the 4th Company, 1st Battalion, 25th E.V.A. Regiment. NERV.

* * *

IA Seldon Presents

An Etherworlds Studio Production

The Atheist God

* * *

The humvee rolled to a weary stop in the top level of a massive underground bunker complex designed to house the combat vehicles of the joint UN/NERV 121st Combat Regiment. There was no one there to greet them. No one to rush up and whistle at the incredible punishment the humvee had suffered before it came limping home. No mechanics, no medics, no ordinance personnel to off-load the extremely volatile weaponry and munitions scattered all over the interior.

It was at this moment that Asuka Langely Sohryu, pilot of the Evangelion Unit 02, unflappable veteran of over a dozen sorties against the horrific monsters code-named "Angels", began to panic.

The 9mm pistol pressed against the back of her head had a lot to do with it.

"What are you doing?" hissed the driver, a tall blonde girl in her late teens. Asuka glanced at her from the corner of her eyes. She looked very strange, as did the other girl, the shorter one with the long black hair. Both were dressed in tight-fitting white leotards, trimmed in yellow and dark blue for the blonde and red and purple for the brunette. Around their waists were the remains of matching mini-skirts so daring that Asuka felt herself blushing at the thought of actually walking around Tokyo-3 in one.

Both girls were filthy, and both were caked in what Asuka intellectually recognized as dried blood.

"Are you going to kill her?" asked the brunette cautiously, watching the fourth passenger with a bone-deep weariness and antipathy.

Asuka felt the muzzle of the pistol tremble against her skull. Finally, a filtered speaker clicked on and a heavy voice said, "No." Asuka felt a shameful relief spreading in her chest. Then the voice went on, "But we can't let her go running off...not yet. Tenoh!"

"What?" the blonde growled.

"Find something to tie her hands. Hino? Sort through this mess and find us some weapons."

Hino, the brunette, spread her hands in resignation, "There isn't much left if one of _them_ attacks. You used up pretty much everything there was in the get-away."

"No," the voice said softly, "I want the small calibers."

"What for?" asked Tenoh, getting out of the humvee. "You said the small stuff wouldn't do shit against their kind except piss them off." She slammed the door shut and stood still for a moment, then, a light bulb went off in her head. "No...you told me to come here for a reason. All those directions you were shouting out. You...you _know_ where we are."

Behind her Asuka heard the other girl, Hino, rummaging around the hundreds of empty shell casings and munitions boxes and discarded weaponry. Without stopping her search she asked, "Where are we?" A tiny sigh, "When are we?"  
The mechanical voice was silent for a long time. Too long. Asuka heard a heavy movement behind her back, got the feeling that someone - _something -_ was glaring over her shoulder at Tenoh. She glared back stubbornly, then lowered her eyes and mumbled something before she disappeared around the side of the humvee. When she reappeared it was with a length of bungee cord in her hands.

A white hand moved into Asuka's field of vision. It wasn't a flesh-and-blood hand, but metal. It opened the door for her. The voice clicked back on, "Get out."

* * *

Chapter One: _In Media Res_

_

* * *

_

He had been in the Tertiary Storage Facility, deep underground, when the first alarms went off. That was inconvenient. The Bridge lay some fifty levels higher in Central Dogma from his position, and transit, even on the rapid-rail, would take half an hour at best.

A half-hour could mean the difference between life and death, Gendo Ikari knew.

During the transit he coldly disciplined himself to keep his hands off the emergency communications link in his pocket. The Bridge would be flooded with priority communications by now, and after only five minutes he could hardly have expected any rational briefing over purely audio connections. No, he would have to wait until he reached the Bridge, and trust that Fuyutsuki and Akagi could control the situation until he arrived.

Katsuragi, though...

He frowned, a stern face twisting into ugliness at the thought of the Major in command of Tactical. She was a useful woman, clever and passionate and dedicated; and a dangerous woman, for those very same reasons. Section-2 kept a tight watch on her movements and conversations, but not nearly tight enough. Certain hints, caustic glances when she thought no one could see her.

She knew something.

Too much.

Too valuable to lightly toss aside, however.

Dilemma.

The pilots trusted her, too; which would make it all the harder to discreetly remove her.

Well, no matter. The tonal wail of the alarms had changed; it was a full-on Angel attack. If it was beginning again, then the good Major would have her hands full fighting the war. That was good.

Gendo frowned, questioning once more just _why_ there had been so long a lapse between the last attack and this one. Five years. The delay was...imponderable, it seemed. There was just _no reason for it._ Yet it was so.

Curiosity, such a familiar and damning itch, slowly forced his hand over to the lift controls. He punched in a seven digit code, patching him into the comm chatter of the Bridge.

"-Units 17 and 24 launching!"

"Sit-Rep on pilots one through eight!"

"One, Four, Seven and Eight are boarding their units now! Pilot Ikari is currently en-route to base via the rapid-rail. Pilot Horikai is in the 2nd Medical Ward, treatment for flu."

"And Asuka?"

"Last reported location was near the Fifth UN Munitions Depot!"

"...then the angel is right on top of her."

Gendo cut the link. He looked up at the ceiling of his lift and began impatiently tapping his foot.

"This is taking far too long."

Thirty minutes later and Gendo walked onto a Bridge that was deathly silent. He swept his frigid gaze across the crew, then coolly walked across the high platform for the stationary figure of Major Misato Katsuragi.

"Report," he ordered brusquely.

Katsuragi, a cheeky woman in her early thirties (she tried to pretend otherwise, note the fashionable purplish streaks she dyed her dark hair with) turned to look at him with a slack-jawed shock. She blinked once or twice, and Gendo repeated his order, wondering if she'd been drinking on the job again.

"S-Sir," she saluted. Gendo ignored the gesture. "Angel...is destroyed."

He felt as though something was being left out. He glanced at the tactical map. A bright blue marker hung over the eastern ridges, the only tombstone an Angel would ever receive. Darker markers in red were converging on its location: the Evangelions. Some twenty were deployed already, and more were surfacing even as he watched.

It puzzled him.

Misato cleared her throat. "Ah...the target. Is destroyed. Twenty minutes after it appeared."

Twenty minutes. Something about the way she said it made his eyes narrow in concentration. Then it clicked. The earliest reaction time NERV had for rapid deployment was sixteen minutes. The fastest it had destroyed an angel was forty minutes after first contact.

Twenty minutes...was impossible.

He looked up to the command platform, his station. Fuyutsuki was there, standing to one side as always and looking just as shocked and confused as anyone else. It was an unbecoming look for the old man, very at odds with his distinguished grey looks.

Gendo moved away from Katsuragi, coming up behind a short, energetic woman with bottled-blonde hair. "Akagi," he announced himself.

She shook her head, upsetting the delicate balance of her glasses but not caring that she did so. "The MAGI has no conclusions. Remote feeds were destroyed during the angel's brief appearance, and cloud-cover has rendered the geo-sat useless for observation."

"And your own observations?"

"Well, after review of the data, the strength of the Blue Pattern, and taking into account some very strange atmospheric anomalies that pattered across a five kilometer area in the moments just before and after the Angel's appearance, there is only one real conclusion I can reach." She leaned back into her chair, aware of the many eyes from the crew watching her. She shrugged, reached for a pack of cigarettes. "And that is that I have no idea."

Gendo resisted the idea of throttling the good doctor. There were too many witnesses.

A high-pitched beeping startled one of the Bridge crew. She keyed her set and spoke rapidly into the microphone, then looked up and shouted, "Major! Visual from Unit 23!"

"Send it to the display!"

The Bridge went very, very still when the first images flickered across the gigantic holographic display.

Dr. Akagi, her unlit cigarette dangling from her lip, stood up slowly. "What in the name of God _happened_ out there?"

No one could answer her. Everyone remained still and quiet as the pictures continued to flow across the display. Pictures of devestation, of ruin, of thousand-meter tall skyscrapers lying flat on their sides, burning.

Gendo was frowning. "What section of the city is this?" he asked.

"This...this isn't a part of the city," someone answered. "It's twenty-five kilometers outside Tokyo-3's municipal limits."

"Then," Misato Katsuragi asked slowly, measuring her words, "Where did those buildings come from?"

No one answered.

A second high-pitched beeping startled the crew. A technician dropped into his chair and keyed a command. He shouted out, "Major! Confirmed location of Pilot Sohryu!"

"Where?"

"Main access outside of the 121st Combat Regiment vehicular complex, she just used her key-card to gain entry. Patching in a visual...now!"

The new pictures caused a new stir to ripple through the Bridge. Mistato felt a chill run down her spine as she digested the images and recognized their meaning. Without hesitation, she ordered, "Sound base-wide alert! Issue orders to the 121st, the 45th, and Section-2's reaction teams! Pilot's life endangered!"

* * *

He...no, _It_, stood nearly two meters tall. Machine? Powered exoskeletal body armor? Asuka had no way of knowing. Once it had been white in colour, now it was mostly a lightish grey with mottled patches everywhere else. Dents, burns, cuts and abrasions covered nearly every square inch of its surface. It looked vaguely human - that is to say, all the right dimensions and most of the pieces were there, but it wasn't human. No human bled orange.

There was no face. Nothing but a blank whitish-grey mask with a disturbingly thin slit running approximately where a mouth should have been. No eyes, no ears, no nose. Yet it saw her, watched her, spoke to her and heard her reply.

She found it repulsive and terrifying.

And very intelligent.

At the first door, sealed tight during the Angel attack, _It_ had turned to her and almost casually asked for her ID card. She'd said nothing. Then It laid down an ultimatum. "Either you tell me, or I'll search you for it. _Thoroughly_." She'd glanced appealingly to the two girls standing to either side of her, but they didn't seem to care, or were too tired to care.

It had taken one step towards her before she stuck out her left hip and pointed to the cargo pocket of her fatigues. It dipped a quick hand into the pocket and pulled out her ID, no funny business at all.

"Thank you," the metallic voice had said.

The thing's politeness was unnerving.

It had apologized for the necessity of tying her hands and elbows, a mumbled excuse about not wanting her to run off and get into any trouble. It had also apologized for the necessity of having a third piece of cord tied around her neck, the end of which he gave to the blonde woman, Tenoh. It'd also given her a pistol, chambered and with the safety off.

"Please don't give her a reason to use it," It had asked.

It'd given Hino, the brunette in red, another pistol and a bag of ammunition. The Thing itself carried something slightly more lethal: a short-barreled FN FAL. A bandoleer of magazines went around its waist, along with two grenades.

The last additions made Asuka worry. The munitions she'd taken from the storage depot were over twenty years old, relics from the UN stockpiles, made during the hellish wars right after Second Impact. The might be safe, or they might be unstable; either way, they were volatile. She hadn't been too worried when they were still in her humvee - they'd been locked securely in foam in a crash-proof box. But now, standing three meters away, it was a whole 'nother story.

She felt calm.

There was no point in resisting - not yet, anyway. Alone, bound, and without a weapon she could do very little. Kick in the blonde girl's stomach, certainly; the brunette didn't look to good - shock maybe - so only a minor worry there, but the Thing...?

Asuka was a very intelligent woman. Graduate of the _Universität Leipzig_ at the age of fourteen, prodigy of mathematics and music, she was also nobody's fool. She could handle the two girls - hell, they looked like children to her! No problem! But the Thing in the white...armour? No. She needed something more.

Something like a general alarm and three battalions of UN soldiers.

Watching the Thing slide her identification into the access slot to open the door, she had a warm feeling that both of those conditions were soon to be fulfilled.

Covertly, she slid a finger into her belt and palmed the tiny stiletto hidden there. The cords wrapped around her wrists were expertly done and a pain in the ass to cut furtively, but she started sawing away nonetheless, getting ready for the right moment to spring free.

The massive blast doors slid open. Asuka glanced once at the camera at the far end of the hall, then started counting the beats of her heart. The Thing chambered a round into the rifle and took point, ambling down the corridor without any sense of urgency at all. A nudge from the blonde girl was all it took for Asuka to follow Its lead.

'..._Zweiundzwanzig...Drieundzwanzig...Vierundzwanzig-!_"

A harsh, atonal wail shattered her hearing. Blood-red lights clicked on, blast doors ahead of them as well as the one behind slammed shut with terrifying force. Asuka worked the stiletto furiously, feeling the cords slacken as she sawed half-way through the line. The brunette crashed down to her knees against the wall, her eyes wide and frightened as she waved her pistol around wildly. The blonde tried shouting questions, but her voice was drowned out by the sirens.

The Thing in white ignored it all and continued walking to the next blast door.

Then, abruptly, the sirens clicked off and the intercom clicked on.

_"Attention! Attention! Intruders in the base, exterior tunnel 12-Alpha-7. Reaction forces to assume defensive perimeters!"_

The Thing stopped a meter short of the blast door. And studied it.

"What now!" Tenoh shouted.

"They'll come for us," mumbled Hino, a tear caressing her cheek. "What a way to die!" she sobbed. "To survive...all of it, and now to get killed in a place like this."

"_Shut up!_" Tenoh shouted at her. "We're_ not _dying here! Right?" She looked at the Thing. Screamed, "_RIGHT?"_

It turned around. Asuka quickly concealed her stiletto. The mechanical voice clicked on, "Stop shouting. Nothing will happen to us."

Asuka pulled a face. "You're kidding, aren't you? Did you just hear them now, or is the stupid too loud for you? _Reaction teams_. Do you know what that means? It means close to a hundred guys in body armor and automatic rifles, sniper teams, tear gas grenades and flash-bangs. All the doors are locked down now, and you're not moving an inch unless its in handcuffs or a bodybag."

The Thing came closer, lifted the rifle and gently laid its muzzle to rest on her cheek. "We've got you, and I know you're important to them."

Asuka snorted, "Boy, you sure are fucked up, aren'tcha? I'm just a captain here. Dime-a-dozen captain. They'll try to keep me alive...but, if worst comes to worst, they've got plenty more just like me."

Sheer bravaura, and a fine bit of acting, if she might say so herself.

I'd like to thank the Academy...

That confidence cracked a little when the Thing...smiled?

'That's...not possible. It's a mask. _A mask!'_

"No, no," the Thing said quietly. "Your rank might just be a captain, but there is no one quite like you, is there? You're special in this place."

Keep it up, keep acting your part. Don't give It anything! "Oh, yeah? How do you figure that?"

The Thing lowered its rifle, "If you were just another nickle-officer, they wouldn't have sounded an alarm and let us know we were spotted. They'd just set up an ambush and kill us all - you, me, them," It pointed to the two girls. "No, you're important. And just what I need to get where I'm going. Now, be quiet for a moment."

It turned away, back to the blast doors leading farther into the base.

Asuka snorted, "You're not gonna get through."

"You might be surprised."

* * *

Misato glared into the security display. "I wanna know _what_ that is. _Where _it came from. _How_ it got there, and I wanted it ten minutes ago!"

As a show of competence and force, it was impressive. Precisely the reason Gendo had hired the woman. For an incursion of this scale, the majority of the Bridge crew were just so much dead weight. Idle hands are worrisome hands, and those hands were notoriously fumble-fingered and prone to "accidents." Giving the unoccupied crew a meaningless task was a sharp decision.

It meant fuck-all right now, though.

No one knew what the thing was (A Martian.) Or where it came from (Mar-...no, Venus? How curious.) How it had gotten there was self-evident. Captain Sohryu had allowed herself to fall into unfriendly hands. He made note to have Katsuragi give the young woman a dressing-down for that failure.

If she survived, of course.

Accidents.

A trickle of reports started coming in as Gendo mounted his own, personal platform in the Bridge. Fuyutsuki nodded to him but said nothing, and the pair listened in to the combat chatter sprinkling the comms as the reaction teams hastily geared themselves and started off into the labyrinthine corridors of NERV.

Twenty minutes, and then the MAGI would override the lockouts on the blast doors surrounding the intruders and the reaction teams would storm in.

A lighter selection of voices joined in on the comm. The Evangelions were returning to their extraction points and were being shuttled down into the launch bays from the surface. A few reported seeing something "unusual" in the streets above. Something dark and spindly - none of it made any sense and sometimes was quite contradictory. A seasoned lieutenant asked them for clarification, but none had gotten a good look at the thing, and then it had vanished altogether in the atypical explosion common to all defeated Angels.

But on one thing they all agreed: whatever it was that they saw was far too large to have been an Angel, and the explosion so large that it had dwarfed anything they'd ever seen before.

That puzzled Gendo. He turned to Fuyutsuki, intent on asking him a quiet question.

He almost missed seeing Ritsuko spit out a mouthful of scalding-hot coffee onto her lap.

Priceless.

"_BLAST DOOR OVERRIDES HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED!"_

"What!" Fuyutsuki snapped, hustling forward to the railing of the platform. "Rescind the override!"

Ritsuko was already doing so, bashing in one lightning-quick command prompt after another. "_I can't!_ The MAGI aren't responding to me anymore!"

* * *

Asuka gaped silently when the blast doors, with a resigned hiss, opened.

Then she shut her eyes, hunched her shoulders and waited for the first BANG!

Instead, she heard, "What are you doing?"

Asuka opened an eye, peered around. 'Blondie, brunette, and..._that_ one.' No UN troops, no Section-2 security detail.

The Thing's harsh voice clicked on, "Surprised, no?"

Asuka didn't know where to begin.

The Thing shifted its rifle into a two-handed grip. "Okay, now we start running."

Asuka couldn't quite stifle a groan and a mutter, "I hate running."

* * *

The Bridge descended into chaos. Worse, it was uncontrolled chaos. Terminals all over the bridge shut down, re-booted, or found themselves twisted into electronic pretzels as their formatting was crash-overwritten. Ritsuko and her assistants were in a mad-mouth froth, shouting orders with one part of their mind while burning keycode command after command into the primary programming in a valiant struggle to re-assert their authority over the digital fiefdoms they ruled.

Like the French, they were having a hard going against their serfs.

Misato was bellowing orders to anyone and everyone she could raise on the communications network. Gendo listened to it absent-mindedly. 'A very smart woman, she is.' It had taken Misato a full minute to realize it, but once she did she started spewing a string of commands instantly.

The blast door overrides were themselves overridden. For NERV, that was a singular event, used only in the case of catastrophic fires or flooding. It meant that _everywhere_ in the base was free and open now. Admission for the general public: about $3 U.S. currency.

The hunt, as they say, was on. The hunters? A full division of the UN's finest soldiers. And a few hundred Section-2 men. All armed to the teeth.

Fuyutsuki took a similarly equanimical view to it all. "Well, we always wanted to have a full-on invasion drill. This just saves us the annoyance of wrangling for the funding to do it."

"Hmm," was Gendo's eloquent response.

One-by-one, the security cameras began going dark.

* * *

Asuka was trim. Asuka was lithe. Asuka was a good candidate for a modeling agency's wet dream.

She was not, however, fit. Twenty minutes of flat-out running proved it.

The one called Tenoh seemed to think that funny. "What'samatter? They don't put you military girls through a physical fitness test every now and then?"

"...Shut..." was the best Asuka could muster.

Five meters ahead of them, the Thing stuck out a hand and waved them to a stop. It was at a corner and cautiously poked Its head around and scanned the hallway beyond. "This way," It said.

This Way turned out to be an elevator bank. Asuka thought it preposterous. Surely they were all shut down after the alarm went off. When a chorus of _dings_ chimed out and every door of the five car bank opened up in unison she felt like someone was making a great fool of her today. The Thing bustled them all into the middle car, covering the hallway behind them with Its rifle until the doors slid shut.

Without a touch of a button, the elevator began descending.

Hino slumped down, exhausted and staring away at nothing. Tenoh leaned against the wall, trying unsuccessfully to hide how raggedly she was breathing. Asuka sneered at her, then focused on regaining her own breath. The Thing didn't move at all.

Ten minutes later and they were still dropping.

"...How are you doing this?" Asuka asked.

She caught Tenoh glancing at the Thing in white, and she waited expectantly for an answer. None was forthcoming.

Twenty minutes after entering the car it began to slow.

"Move to the sides," the Thing ordered. Tenoh gave Asuka's neck-rope a tug and unkindly flattened her against the hand-rails. Hino looked up apathetically, then scooted over. The elevator came to a stop and with a chime the doors parted.

Asuka heard, "HALT!"

The Thing traversed the muzzle of the FN FAL and squeezed the trigger.

* * *

A squeal of electronic gibberish cut through the chatter of the Bridge.

"_Contact! We have cont-"_

Then the screams started.

"Level!" Misato barked into her headset. "What level?"

The sharp reports of gunfire was all the response she got.

* * *

There was a ringing in her ears.

Five shattering bursts in a confined space at less than a meter's distance would do that to a girl.

After the fifth shot, the Thing in white had bulled out of the elevator. Asuka knew _damn_ well _not_ to follow him. So too, apparently, did the girls with her. They flinched as a succession of bullets zipped through the open door and punched out the thin metal wall at the back, heard even more weapons open up in the hallway beyond. A good firefight, Asuka realized, perhaps a squad of twelve men or more. Salvation, it seemed, was near at hand.

The gunfire rose to a feverish pitch, then went silent.

The air was full of the acrid stench of cordite.

Asuka felt the restraints around her hands relax. She'd finally sawed through the cord. She wrapped a finger into the bungee cord, tightening it back up again; but she was free, now. Well - free_ish_; there was still another length of cord around her elbows, and those were run behind her back, but with her hands free her options had just grown, however minutely.

'Now, hopefully that _Thing_ is lying out there with a few nice holes in It, and soon they'll start shouting for these two to surrender and come out. Blondie is close, if I can stick her somewhere soft - kick the other one in the face - then make a run for it...'

She felt a tap on her shoulder. Looked up to see It standing over her.

"You can stop plotting now."

Tenoh stood up slowly. "Are they?"

The Thing nodded.

Tenoh swallowed heavily.

Hino, dazed on the floor, said, "You've been shot."

So it had, Asuka realized. Twice. One was in a shoulder, a flesh wound (or, better yet, maybe in the shoulder socket, shattering the bone.) The second hole was in the chest, in an area that should have been the right lung. Both holes were leaking a thick, syrupy orangish-red goo.

The Thing's blank face looked down at Hino. "I'll be fine," It said, a fleeting hint of emotion touching the unemotional hiss of the electronic voice.

"Fine, like hell! You've been shot," protested Tenoh.

The Thing's head snapped to her face. Asuka got the impression it was glaring a hole into the blonde's forehead. "I'll. Be. Fine. Now, get her up and start running."

"More running?" Hino sighed.

"Not very much more," the Thing assured her. "We'll be there soon."

Asuka was jerked to her feet and pushed out of the elevator. She stumbled with her first step, sliding on a handful of shell casings, which seemed to just about cover the floor. Where they came up short the blood began, and in the middle of the blood were the bodies. Section-2 men, all of them. She recognized them by the conspicuous lack of anything in sky-blue, and the crimson fig-leaf with NERV protruding out of it.

There had been nine standing guard outside the elevator banks.

'Where am I?' Asuka quickly read the level number off of the walls. 'Level 51-Alpha? That's the Bridge!' It wasn't, not really, they were still a good twenty minute's walk from the Bridge; but they were very close.

"Ready?" the Thing asked.

Hino was staring at the bodies.

"Hino? _Hino._" The Thing looked to Tenoh. "Get her moving," he curtly ordered.

Tenoh let Asuka's neck-rope drop and went over to the other girl, cupping her face and tilting it up to look in her eyes. "Rei, Rei girl you need to get up. We have to keep moving." She gave Hino a gently shake and a soft slap. "_Rei._ We have to keep moving."

Asuka inched away from her captors, heading surreptitiously for a corpse and the MP5 submachine gun slung around its shoulder. She was almost on it when she heard a tiny burst of static and a frantic voice shouting, "-espond! Contact reported, _where?_ Sound off! What level?"

Asuka felt her whole body trembling with anxious energy. She unwound her finger from the bungee cord and let it fall slack. No one seemed to notice, they were busy with the Hino girl. Now she had to make a choice. Gun, or go for the mike bud she saw sticking up from the collar of the deceased Section-2 agent.

'Either one could get me killed,' she processed logically. 'Have to make a choice fast, the brunette is getting up! Come on, Asuka, choose!'

She flung herself at the corpse. The blonde girl shouted an alarm, and she heard the Thing whipping around, felt the cold touch of the rifle's muzzle tracking up her leg and onto her spine. She stretched out her hands...

"Fifty-one Alpha! Contact on-"

A powerful hand snagged the back of her collar and carelessly wrenched her away from the dead man's microphone. Asuka heard an animated buzz of questions in the earpiece, then she was too far away to hear anything at all.

Feeling nothing at all to lose, she spun in her clothes and launched herself into an attack, thrusting blindly with her stiletto at the Thing and beating its restraining arm with her right fist while her feet lashed out at Its kneecaps.

Metal plating on its ribs turned the springy stiletto aside like it was made of plastic. She bruised her fist on the Thing's arm, and felt a strange, painful reverberation run up her feet and legs when she kicked Its kneecaps.

It dropped her unceremoniously.

"Are you finished?"

* * *

No one was answering anymore, but that didn't matter. Misato knew where the enemy was, and, furthermore, Asuka was alive.

'No, she _may be_ alive.' The silence that followed her burst was ominous. Misato shook it off. 'No time for that.'

She keyed her mike, "All units, converge on Level 51. All units, Level 51!" After a moment's hesitation, she added, "I am declaring a free-fire zone. Level 51, exclusive of Delta Compartment."

A few of the techs were staring at her. She had, with but a few words, turned every compartment, every storeroom, every hallway and every cupboard save the Bridge itself into a shooting gallery. Anyone and everyone was a target - even if they happened to be dressed like a member of NERV. Anyone not pugged into the tactical net was a dead man.

Misato closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 'It can't be helped. We have to stop them, before they get too close.'

A joyful shout from Ritsuko's section swung everyone's attention away from the depressed Major. Maya Ibuki was cheering like mad and clapping her hands. "I've got partial control for the MAGI restored!"

"Can you seal off the blast doors?" Ritsuko snarled.

"Uh...no."

"Then keep at it and tell me what we do have!"

"Uh, yes ma'am! We have: launch bay, elevator control, environmentals-"

The report was cut short by a burst from the launch bay. "Pilot Ikari has arrived and is entering his Evangelion!"

Misato processed the information with a grunt, then mumbled a bit as a thought came to her. "We have elevator control?" she asked.

Maya hesitated, "Yes...yes, ma'am. We do."

"Unit 01, do you read me?"

Shinji's anxious voice came almost instantly. "Roger, reading you."

"Deploy your unit to the nearest heavy-lift cargo elevator, on the double. Move it, mister!" She turned on Maya, "Re-rout his elevator to this floor. Top priority! Have him station at the nearest choke point to 51-Alpha."

"Yes, ma'am!"

* * *

Her arms were tied up again, but now her elbows were free. She wasn't dead (yet,) wasn't hurt (save what she'd done to herself,) and, to top it all off, the Thing had seemed _amused_ by her attempt to escape or go down fighting. It had even shaken Its head whimsically, as if it had all been a private joke that only It could understand.

The Tenoh girl was not as amused. She frog marched Asuka ahead of her now, a pistol pressed hard into the small of her back.

"One more trick like that and you'll never walk again," she'd hissed into Asuka's ear.

Asuka believed her.

'Doesn't matter,' she told herself. 'I got our location out to Misato, and they had to waste five precious minutes tying me back up.' Reinforcements, she prayed, were galloping on their way.

After a while, their pace, as always set by the Thing leading in front, slackened. Then it stopped altogether. The Thing slumped sideways into a wall, and Asuka could see Its shoulders moving up and down heavily, as if It were breathing.

'So...it's some kind of body armor,' she realized.

Hino, somewhat alive and aware to herself, went over to the Thin-...to _him_, and slid one of his arms over her shoulders. "How bad is it," Asuka heard her ask.

The man inside the suit gave his head a little shake. "Not bad." He pushed himself off the wall, removed his arm from Hino's shoulder and staggered forward. "We need to keep moving. There isn't much time."

'Damn right there isn't,' thought Asuka triumphantly. They were getting closer to one of the strategic choke points scattered all across Level 51. If there was any chance of stopping them short of the bridge, it would be there. She readied herself for another chance to escape.

Just before they turned the blind corner and approached the narrow gap spanning into the Delta section the man stopped and leaned against the wall. "Hino...peek around the corner. Do it quick. Tell me what you see."

The girl did as she was told, quickly out-and-back. She blinked rapidly, then did it a second time. She darted back with a yelp and everyone flinched as a buzz-saw of bullets chewed up the wall behind her.

"Some kind of robot!" she shouted.

"Robot?" the man questioned. "What kind?"

"I don't know! The _big_ kind!"

The man leaned down, almost pressing the blank face of his mask into her nose. "_How_ big?"

Asuka figured it out first. Before the Hino girl shrugged her shoulders and said, "Maybe ten meters?"

"Ten meters? Only...only ten meters?" The man shook his head again, his shoulders dropping with resignation. Then he straightened, "What did it look like?"

"I didn't get a good look-"

"Anything at all?" the man demanded impatiently.

Hino fumbled for a word, "Purple! I guess."

Asuka stiffened. 'Oh, dear God..._him_."

The man cocked his head, "Purple?" Slowly he turned to look at Asuka. "Purple..."

* * *

He watched her for a long time. Long enough for Asuka to start fidgeting underneath his unseen gaze. Then, in a startling movement, he pushed off of the wall and held out his rifle to Tenoh. "Give me your pistol."

Whenever he was in doubt, Shinji Ikari, pilot of the Evangelion Unit 01, hesitated. This moment in his life was no exception. Oh, he'd sent of a burst of 7.62 chain-fire when he spotted a dark shadow peek around the corner of the blind a second time, but then he magnified the image and realized that the shadow he was blindly firing at was, actually, a girl. A young girl.

"What is going on here?" he wondered aloud. The launch and maintenance techs had only given him some bare facts, and Misato almost less, before he'd been hey-diddle-diddled up to this choke point and told to shoot anything and everything that didn't register on the tactical network before poking around the corner.

But, a girl? Was she in NERV, or attached to the UN forces? He couldn't just up and massacre some young girl for no better reason than that she'd wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

Could he?

He thought about raising Misato on the comm, asking her for some clarification about his orders; but, before he could, someone else was coming around the corner.

Mind full of the image of some girl's head exploding like a watermelon, Shinji Ikari, true to form, hesitated. A moment later, he didn't feel quite so bad for having done so. There was only one woman in this base with hair just _that_ particular shade of golden-red. Only one woman who managed to make even drab fatigues look...arousing.

He toggled his external speakers, "Asuka! What are you doing up here? I nearly blew your head off!"

Asuka frowned at him. Nothing new. But then she started cussing him. Roundly. In German. She only saved those particular expressions for when she was Truly, Utterly, Extremely Pissed at him or something he'd done.

The picture pieced together slowly for the poor man.

"Asuka...why are your hands tied?"

* * *

'Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.' The litany was monotonous. The litany was without heat. It was just about all Asuka had to keep her from charging the purple monstrosity sitting squarely across the short bridging divide and kicking the hatch open and then kicking the man sitting inside of it. 'I knew he could be slow sometimes, but JESUS CHRIST!'

The cold point of the pistol pressed against the back of her ear forced her forward again, the leader now in this round-robin formation they were shifting through. "Keep moving," said the man.

Slowly, with Hino and Tenoh trailing cautiously behind them, they crossed halfway over the bridge.

"Stop," said the man. Then he addressed himself to the ugly bulk of Unit 01. "Come on out, son."

"...I have orders to shoot anyone who tries to cross this bridge."

"I know you do," agreed the man sympathetically.

"You know?" Shinji sounded amazed. Asuka groaned. It was obvious - to her at least - what his orders had been. The three second burst of chain fire had made his orders _abundantly_ clear.

But the man let no trace of impatience into his filtered voice. "Yes, I know. But, you're not going to shoot us."

"...I have my orders."

The man was shaking his head. "But you're not going to follow them. Are you?" He waited for a reply, then prominently displayed his pistol, setting it flush against Asuka's right temple. "_Are_ you?"

'Shit,' thought Asuka. 'I have to do something or this idiot's going to let them go through!'

She started talking rapidly, lying her ass off. "Yes he will! Do you know who's in that Evangelion? Shinji Ikari! You've no doubt heard of him. The most fiercesome pilot of the entire Evangelion program. He's fought in _fifteen_ separate engagements against the Angels, three more than _me_ even! He's gunned them down, chopped them up, and blown them apart. There's no way you're gonna get past him - so, set your weapons down, give yourselves up, and I promise they'll go easy on you."

She said every word at the highest volume her voice would allow, and felt like biting her tongue off every second syllable.

The man behind her - laughed.

"He sounds like a great warrior."

"He is!" Asuka snarled, glaring daggers at the lumpy bulge of the cockpit.

"What was it you said? Three more than you?" The man chuckled. "So, one might say he's the _best_ pilot in all of the Evangelion program?"

Asuka ground her teeth together. "Yes. He. Is."

"So...he'd have no problems at all gunning you down in cold blood, would he?" The man looked over her shoulder at the Evangelion. "Well, then - let's have it, boy. Come on! We're all here, waiting. No place to hide..."

The Evangelion made no move.

The man nodded. "Come on out, Shinji Ikari. I won't hurt you." He waited a beat, then nodded at Asuka. "Or her."

A moment passed. Then Asuka heard the tell-tale _hiss_ of depressurization and saw steam coming out around the edges of the cockpit hatch. "Don't! Don't you _DARE!"_

Shinji hid his deep blue eyes beneath a fall of his dark hair. He couldn't look Asuka in the eyes, just as he couldn't kill her.

By her threats, both loud and verbose, she did not seem to share the same qualms.

* * *

Misato took out her H&K and chambered a round. "Report!" she snapped.

"No contact with Unit 01's pilot!"

Ten minutes and still no contact. She'd heard the gunfire. Everyone had heard the gunfire. A cold, anxious little pit was forming in the back of Misato's stomach, growing larger and colder with every passing minute.

'Impossible. Three people just simply _cannot_ take out an Evangelion lying in wait for them around a blind corner and across a bridge. It just can't happen!'

There was a darker fear she had. One she absolutely refused to face. But, in the corners of her mind, there was a malevolent whisper mocking her.

He killed Asuka.

It might have happened. She'd damn well sure sent him there _knowing_ it could happen.

'No. That's not gonna happen. It won't.'

She was alwasy lousy at reassuring herself.

With a start she snapped back to reality. "Brass check your weapons! Live rounds, find cover and check your targets before you fire!"

Many of the Bridge crew were armed now. Barely armed, as it were, because there was very little in the way of small arms stores on the Bridge. Pistols mostly, a few submachine guns. A pittance, if what might come through that door had enough power to take on an Evangelion in an unfair fight and best it.

'Ah, the wonderful things I dream of,' Misato thought wryly as she slid down behind a sturdy-looking console. She spared a glance up above at the Commander and Sub-Commander, both of whom had refused weapons and declined to seek shelter.

"Handle it," was all Gendo had said.

"Fine, fine, I'll handle it," Misato mumbled to herself now. "Just don't blame me if you get your beard clipped."

She was just moving on into a good laugh at the thought of that happening when the door to the Bridge hissed open. "HOLD FIRE!"

Standing in the open hatch, hands held up and a downcast, hangdog look on his face, was Shinji Ikari. He was having his ear bent by a loud, vehement, vicious, unrelenting torrent of sharp German curses. Misato felt her breath catch and her heart soar.

'They're alive. They're both alive!'

She came back down with a bleak plummet. They were now hostages.

Shinji, pushed from behind, came stumbling into the Bridge. Asuka, still in full spate, was unceremoniously shoved in after him. At their backs stood a two meter tall behemoth, a monster in mottled white-and-grey. Burnt, scratched, shot and bleeding...orange? Misato brushed that last bit aside, focusing instead on the leveled FN FAL that was aimed, it seemed, straight at her forehead.

'...Jeez, that thing looks big.'

The white...Thing stepped into the room. Behind It came two young girls, teenagers wearing daring outfits that made even Misato pause for a moment. However, they too carried weapons, and they looked like they knew how to use them.

Time to do something. "Put down your weapons, now!" she shouted.

The Thing cocked its head - mask? - and looked blankly at her like she was stupid.

"On the deck. NOW!" Misato shouted again.

The Thing's face turned away, ignoring her. She felt her blood pressure race up.

There was a static clicking. A voice, dry and filtered, boomed out from the Thing. "Hino, Tenoh, stay here and watch them. If anyone so much as moves, shoot both of them in the back of their spines."

The two girls shared a quick glance, then cautiously leveled their pistols at Shinji and Asuka. Misato had the instant forebooding that, push come to shove, these two teenage girls would do what they were told, without hesitation.

She fumbled with her voice. "H-Hold fire!"

The Thing ignored her entirely. It had lowered its rifle and was moving, limping actually, across the Bridge. She watched it go, powerless and angry as hell. It walked over to the access stair to the Commander's Deck, leaned heavily on the railing, and slowly started up, one stair at a time.

Gendo watched It come. There was no fear in him, that was an emotion he'd discarded years ago, when the course of his life had become utterly, irrevocably set. Fuyutsuki behind him watched with trepidation, but he showed very little of it in his face and his eyes.

The Thing came slowly, painfully it seemed. Gendo's alert eyes quickly spotted the bullet holes in the chest and shoulder, wondered how it could even stand upright. In an excruciating length of time, the Thing moved up before his desk, turned to face him, and stared.

Gendo, his hands interwoven beneath his nose, stared back.

The Thing bent down, and placed Its rifle down on the floor.

Gendo watched It carefully now, surprised at the unusual guesture. He was even more surpised at what happened next.

The armor - as he guessed it to be - rippled. It split, dark lines appearing and retracting, folding in and up and around on itself. A steamy fog, redolent with a foul stench of blood and ripe, unwashed flesh rolled out across his face. He heard a soft noise, slick flesh dropping heavily down onto the polished floor of the Deck.

A body emerged. Terrible. Mutilated. Powerful. Dozens of scars, nearly invisible against skin so pale and white that it looked as if had not seen the sun in years. Other scars were more obvious, if only because they were not so much scars as chunks of flesh simply torn away and left to heal as best they could. Two bullet holes marred the chest with dark, bloody wounds. One in the meaty part of the shoulder, the other squarely below a missing nipple and above a riot of old scars that criss-crossed the entire abdomen. They leaked in faint pulses.

Gendo looked up, the man was enormous, perhaps 186 centimeters in height. His face, partially hidden beneath an unwashed and reeking mop of brown hair shot through with silver and an unruly beard, was deeply lined, but, as Gendo saw, still young. Far too young. Here, too, there were scars; the most prominent being a lump of tissue closing the man's left eye. His right one was a deep, dark blue. An ocean of so many mixed emotions that it was impossible to understand.

The man started trembling like a leaf in the wind. He swallowed once or twice. Coughed.

Then he braced to attention, his right hand snapping up into a salute of metronomic military precision.

Unable to help himself, Gendo felt his lips part slightly in a silent gasp.

"Pilot..." the man said, his voice barely a whisper it was so rough. "E.V.A Unit...257. Commander...Second Battalion...25th E.V.A Regiment. Lieutenant Colonel...Shinji Ikari.

"Reporting for Duty."

* * *

AN: Two things. One - this story has been kicking around in my head for two years now. Sat down and worked it out. Might continue it, if I have the time and come up with some interesting ideas.

Two - This is an AU, obviously. It also contains some parts that could be considered "Crossover". It isn't. And I feel no need to explain more than that. Take it or leave it as it is.


	2. Old Wounds

Chapter Two: Old Wounds

* * *

Much about NERV - this one, anyway - was unfamiliar. Hallways, doors, people; one thing, though, was constant: the ceiling tiles of the hospital. How many times had he woken up, expecting to be somewhere he was not, only to stare up at the dimpled tiles of the ceiling he so readily loathed in his youth?

It was a rhetorical question. One he never dared think about too deeply.

The shakes started almost immediately.

Within a minute he was trembling so violently that the handcuffs securing him to the bed frame were ringing like bells. He clenched his jaw so he wouldn't bite off his tongue, an instinctual reaction that had been drilled into him thousands of times over thousands of hours. A machine by his head began beeping, its digital brain alarmed by the rapid rise it detected with its monitored leads glued to its patient's head and chest. Pondering this sudden change, the machine considered for a nanosecond the programmed choices set within its parameters. In the next nanosecond it executed three functions.

The first was to administer a muscle relaxant. The second was to top its first dose with a powerful seditave. The third was to alert the nurses.

It beat the three-man security detail stationed in the room by an eternity of three seconds.

People flooded into the room with a bewildering array of machines, syringes, and medications. They peered kindly into their patient's eye, asked him questions he could not begin to answer, and subjected him to a battery of the most useless physiological tests. Had he been able to crack his jaw and answer them, he would have told them to get away. There was nothing they could do to help him. Nothing at all.

Suddenly he couldn't breath.

A doctor looking at his face in that same instant saw his right eye widen in alarm, heard him struggle for air and spotted the rapid flare of his nostrils.

"His lung collapsed again!" the doctor shouted.

The nurses jerked a stainless steel cart over to the bedside. Gloves and sterile plastic bags went flying everywhere. A long, glistening needle attatched to an empty syringe appeared.

"_Hold him down!_"

The needle sank into his chest, between two ribs halfway up his chest. The plunger was extracted.

Shinji Ikari could breath once again.

The drugs started working. His body unclenched, his limbs slowly wound down into stillness, and the bright colour of his right eye faded, then it closed. He went back to sleep, wondering if he would wake up in the hospital again - or if he would find himself somewhere else.

* * *

Misato Katsuragi watched the small drama play out behind a glass window. "Does he usually shake like that?"

Standing next to her, flipping idly through a hospital chart, Ritsuko Akagi adjusted her glasses and said, "Every time he regains consciousness. I'm starting to think it's a psychosomatic disorder."

"Psycho-whatsits?"

"A physical reaction buried in his subconscious fears. Like a child who was burned by a hot stove who then wets himself whenever he sees fire."

Misato looked at her friend, "He hasn't, has he?"

"What?"

"...Pissed himself."

"No." Ritsuko pulled out a pen and checked something off on one of the charts. "Not yet, anyway."

Misato nodded. "So, is he human?"

"He appears to be."

"Appearances can be deceiving."

"DNA testing takes time."

"How much time? It's been two days already."

Ritsuko snorted, "You want quick results? Watch an American television program."

Misato rolled her eyes. "Like I've had time to watch any T.V." She hesitated, then said softly, "I do see some similarities, you know?"

"I do too," agreed Ritsuko. "So did the Commander and the Sub-Commander." She let the chart flip shut and put away her pen. "Might mean something, but it might not, too. One thing _is_ certain, though: that can't be Shinji Ikari."

"I know," said Misato, unconvincingly.

Ritsuko gave her a serious look. "I'm in all earnestness. Shinji Ikari is twenty years old, stands 171 centimeters tall, and has two scars on the entirety of his body. _That_ person," she indicated the man handcuffed to the hospital bed, "is fifteen centimeters taller, looks like he's forty-five, and is so badly cut up and in so many ways that it is a miracle he's still alive."

"Is it really that bad?" asked Misato. "Most of the scars I see look superficial. Flesh wounds and muscle tissue and the like."

"It's more than that," Ritsuko said grimly. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, ignoring the many multilingual signs nearby telling her that she was expressly forbidden to do so. "A lot of it is what you think. Flesh wounds, missing muscle mass. But some of it runs pretty deep. Those scars on the abdomen, for instance. The pattern they make indicates that something...or someone, had ripped that man's stomach open. With their teeth."

Misato's face twisted with revulsion. "Someone was _eating_ him?"

Ritsuko nodded, "There are corresponding damages to his abdominal muscles and the small and large intestinal tracts. A piece of his liver was torn out at one point and then grew back. A chunk of his stomach is gone - though, someone with very clever hands went in there and stitched it back together. There's also a very long scar running all the way up his right arm. It starts at the join in his hand between the middle and ring fingers and runs all the way up to his bicep. Technically, he shouldn't even be able to move the damn thing. The damages to his left eye are even more serious. There's scar tissue showing up in the x-ray all the way back through his brain and out the other side of his skull."

Misato mouthed a silent obscenity.

Ritsuko chucked, "That's not the weird part, though. Weird part is: somehow, his left eyeball is still intact." She let out a long streamer of blue-grey smoke. "Whoever this guy is, he's been through Hell and back and somehow survived.

"Quite a mystery."

* * *

They'd given her an unflattering pair of olive-drab pants, an oversized shirt, and heavy boots to wear. This in accompaniment with the heavy, three-ringed handcuffs that they'd slapped across her wrists from the start. It was better than nothing, she supposed, and it was _cold_ in this place.

Her interrogator was the same person it had been the previous four times. A tall, middle-aged woman in a uniform with long dark hair streaked with purple dye. She looked ridiculous, though, quite attractive.

She'd given her name to be Katsuragi. A Major.

The first question was the same as well. "What is your name?"

"Haruka Tenoh."

"And where were you born?"

"Nagano Prefecture. Little place called Iijima, in the Kamiina District."

As usual, there was a pause here, where the woman would lean back in her chair across the table and stare at her for a long, long time.

"Where do you live?" the woman would finally ask.

"The Minato Ward in Tokyo, near Juuban."

Again, there would be a pause.

"...How old are you?"

"Seventeen."

* * *

Misato glared at her coffee cup, nursing a headache and wishing she was a home right now instead of in her office at four in the morning. The door behind her opened, and she perked up as a delicious scent of food came drifting her way. She turned around, then slumped when she spotted the tall, long-haired, unshaven vagabond who stood leaning against the entrance.

"Oh, you."

"Hey, hey! Is that anyway to greet a man who brings you breakfast?"

"Stuff it Kaji. I'm in no mood for you and your mind-games. Now go away."

Ryoji Kaji did no such thing. Instead, he came up to the vacant desk next to her own and put down a greasy-looking bag of fast-food next to her elbow, then took a seat and kicked up his heels. "Rough going with the interrogations?"

Misato thought about kicking him out. But the food smelled good, and she was hungry, and tired. 'I'll kick his ass later,' she promised herself, snatching up the bag and diving in. "Yeah," she mumbled around her first bite of bread. "Four times now with the two girls. Neither one of them is changing their story at all."

"Which is?"

"Impossible," said Misato flatly. "And that's all I'm gonna say."

Kaji hummed to himself, then dropped his feet down and leaned forward. "Let me guess. Both girls claim to be teenagers, under the age of twenty. Which means they were born after Second Impact; yet, both girls _also_ claim to have been born in places that ceased to exist after the Impact, and claim to currently live in a ward of Tokyo that is now about thirty meters under the ocean." He looked at her with big, innocent eyes. "Did I get it right?"

Misato snarled at him, "How did you know that?"

Kaji made a flippant gesture. "I come in here when you're in the bathroom and take super-spy photographs with my super-spy camera I keep tied up in my super-spy ponytail."

"_Kaji-"_

"Ritsuko told me."

Misato slumped. "She shouldn't be doing that. You're being watched, you know?"

"I know. And, for the record, I didn't ask. She was the one who gave me the transcripts."

Misato squeezed the bridge of her nose. "They're lying, of course."

"Hmm...I don't know about that."

"What?"

"They're very consistent with their claims."

Misato made a face, "But it's _impossible_. We even sent out a team to study the areas they claim to have come from. No one is there! No one has been there for nearly twenty years now!"

"According to what we know," Kaji countered. "And we've been wrong before, haven't we?"

"That isn't the point!" Misato protested. "This isn't just NERV. This is the Ministry of Population, the United Nations Census Bureau, and testimony from over seventy survivors of Second Impact that we've managed to track down. No one lives there anymore!"

Kaji looked away and held up his hands, giving up the argument. Misato fumed at him for a while longer, then buried herself in the food. After a while, Kaji asked another question.

"How are the kids?"

Misato smiled unlovingly. "Bitching at each other, same ol' same ol'."

* * *

Shinji entered the hanger bay of NERV's 3rd Aerial Defense Battalion with a great deal of trepidation. It was late, or early, depending on how you looked at it, and he knew that this was where he'd find Asuka.

Oh, joy.

Ever since the Accident she'd spent a great deal of her time wandering from place-to-place within the legion that called itself NERV. She'd spent time serving in the 9th UN Regiment as a logistics officer, transferred to a mechanic's battalion servicing the motor pool of the 5th Mechanized Division, did field training with the Section-2 Emergency Reaction Forces, a stint with NERV's Intelligence Analysts, then finally wound up here, with the 3rd A.D.B.

Watching her bounce back-and-forth over the course of five years, Shinji sometimes wondered why she hadn't come here in the first place. It was here, almost naturally it seemed, that Asuka had finally found the spiritual home she'd been so desperately lacking in the aftermath of the Accident.

It was here that she could be a pilot again.

Her words.

He slipped into the hanger bay, padding quietly through the parked rows of F-308B "Kingfisher" fighter-bombers, gingerly threading his way to the section of the bay where he knew she would be hiding. In time, he heard a loud metallic ringing echo through the air, followed by a string of profanities in a variety of languages.

He felt like leaving right then and there.

Around the last Kingfisher he came upon her, sitting underneath a partially dismantled fighter, wearing a mechanic's coveralls and a good deal of dirt, grease and grime. She had her hair tied back, and was sitting down just ahead of the fighter's fuselage sucking on an injured knuckle. A large wrench lay on the ground just behind her, along with various intimidating pipes and pieces that Shinji couldn't begin to fathom the purpose of.

She spotted him.

"What do you want?" she asked quietly, trying to avoid a confrontation.

Shinji started to lift his hands, let them fall, then clasped them together and started fiddling. "You weren't at home last night."

She grunted, "I didn't feel like it, so I stayed in one of the bunks here."

"Oh." He fidgeted.

"What?" Asuka finally snapped.

Shinji started. "It...It's just that - I'd made you dinner. And you didn't show up. I was worried."

"I'll be fine," she commented dryly, lying down on her back and reaching up into an open plate on the underbelly of the fighter.

"I was just worried," said Shinji. "Misato hasn't been home either."

Asuka cursed and yanked a tangle of wires free from the fighter. "Haven't seen her."

Shinji felt his patience slipping. "Asuka? Asuka, will you _look at me?_"

She hesitated, then thrust the wires aside and slid back out from underneath the fighter and glared at him. "_What?_"

"I just want to know if you are all right."

"I'm just _peachy._" She glared at him, asking silently if he really wanted to do this now.

A part of him said it was a good time to leave now. Instead, he listened to the other half of himself, the one that had grown up in the last five years. The one that said, no matter what she does or what she says, she was still his...friend.

"Asuka, I'm sorr-"

"_Shut up._ I don't need your apology or care to hear it. You had a _job_ to do, Ikari. And you fucked that up."

Shinji felt his body tense. "If I had done my _job_," he caustically replied, "you would be dead right now."

Asuka shrugged, as if they were talking about somebody else. "What of it?"

"Damn it, Asuka! Why are you being so pigheaded _stubborn_ about this?" He gave her a piteous look. "Are you really going to sit there, look me in the eye - _Look me in the eye!_" She lifted her gaze, stared back at him steadily. He went on with a calmer tone. "Are you really going to tell me that you would have been all right with me blowing you apart with my Evangelion? Really?"

She held his gaze for a minute, then looked away. "No one asked you to save me," was her best mumbled excuse.

Shinji sighed, "No one ever asked me to. Not two days ago, not five years ago. Not once. Not _ever._"

"So you think that just because two and two makes five for you that it's just fine to keep doing things you're not supposed to do?" Asuka scoffed. "How the hell did you survive all these years?"

"By doing what I thought was necessary," Shinji answered gently. "Not what other people told me to do."

Asuka sneered at him. "That will catch you up one day, you know? And then you'll be just like me: a pilot without a purpose. Pathetic, pitied, shoved aside." She shook her head. "I hope I'll be there to see it. I most surely do."

She laid back down, stared uncomprehendingly at the pile of junk hanging centimeters over her face, waiting for Shinji to leave her alone and in peace. She knew her words were wounding, and not only for him. She wanted to cry right then and there, feeling the deep agony of the old scars tearing back open and flooding her with a misery so deep and impenetrable that she could scarce see any light of hope in the waters.

'Go away,' she begged silent. 'Just please...go away.'

She saw Shinji come closer. Heard him sit down next to her legs. When she felt his hand touch her own she couldn't help herself anymore. The tears just wouldn't keep.

Softly, she heard him say, "Father has put me on the standby roster, Asuka." He held her hand gently, unmindful of the grease and oil and the rough callouses.

She sobbed silently.

Her wish had been granted.

* * *

Gendo stared at the machine, wondering who built it, and why.

And how.

The machine stared back at him unresponsively, but it was definitely aware of his presence. How he knew this was uncertain. A gut instinct in a man who trusted such feelings implicitly. It knew he was there. It knew who he was. And, Gendo felt certain, that if it wanted to, it could kill him.

"Terrifying."

"It is."

He turned his head and watched Dr. Akagi walking through the on-again off-again lighting of the Tertiary Storage Facility, the closest thing to a secure place to house this machine and keep it from prying eyes.

"What have we learned?" he demanded.

"Not much," Ritsuko admitted. She indicated the machine, "It sealed itself up when...the prisoner collapsed. We know it weighs about 300kg, that it can hold one human of up to 186 centimeters, and that it opens and closes, moves, can operate weaponry, and that there are external speakers. Presumably there are devices that allow it to see and hear as well, but we've yet to see any indication of such devices.

"And that's about all of it," she sighed. "Everything else is a blank slate."

Gendo nodded once. Then looked at the strange machine from the corner of his eyes. He had a feeling - a hunch. "Have you tried asking it?"

Ritsuko blinked rapidly. "I beg pardon?"

"Asking it," said Gendo in all seriousness. "Directly."

Ritsuko looked at him. Looked at the machine. Looked at him. "You mean...ask _that_-?"

"Yes, Doctor."

Ritsuko looked bewildered. After a moment and a few covert glances to ensure they were alone, she leaned forward and asked in a whisper, "Sir? Have you been drinking again?"

Gendo frowned. "Not funny."

"Well..."

"I'm serious about this."

"Of course."

"...So?"

Ritsuko looked around again, "You really want me to?"

"Yes!" he snapped, his temper running dangerously short.

"Okay, okay!" Ritsuko capitulated, her hands up to ward him off. She walked up to the machine, fiddled with her lab coat. Looked at it. Fiddled with her coat again. "This feels ridiculous."

"Get on with it, woman."

Ritsuko looked over at him, "For the record, I want you to know I think this is ridiculous and won't work."

"Never know until you try," Gendo replied sanguinely. "Now, if you don't mind?"

"Fine! Fine. Okay...Uh, hello? Anyone there?" She waited. "Hellooo?" She waited some more. "Could you tell us what you are?"

Nothing.

Ritsuko stepped back, a tiny smug smile on her lips. "Told you it wouldn't work."

Gendo thought for a moment. "Try addressing it directly."

"You really want to keep doing this?"

"Try it."

"Okay...uh, hello - white-and-grey machine with lots of scars on it. Do you hear me? Can you tell me what you are?"

Nothing.

"No," said Gendo, feeling an insight. "Not like that. Use it's designation."

"Designation? The one the prisoner used?" Gendo nodded. "All right. E.V.A. Unit 257-?"

The machine straightened. Ritsuko stumbled back, almost falling over. "It moved! It just moved!"

"Yes," Gendo mumbled, stepping forward in her place. "E.V.A. Unit 257?" The machine's head turned to look at him. "Is that your designation?" The machine made no move. Gendo watched it suspiciously, wondering if he had asked the wrong question. "Unit 257, could you tell me what you are and who made you?"

The machine made no move or response. Then, just as Gendo was preparing to ask it a different question, a tiny holographic screen appeared over the right breast of the machine. Gendo looked at it warily, he would have to come very, very close to the thing if he wanted to read it.

He took the step forward.

**:/Command Identification required to access Memory Logs.**

** :/Please speak loudly and with a clear voice your Command Identification.**

Gendo read the lines twice. "Well," he said slowly. "We appear to have something here."

* * *

The First-Tier command crew of the Bridge were on their fourth shift and fifth round of a series of stale coffee. None had had much sleep in the last two days, having spent nearly every waking hour in the aftermath of what was officially recorded as Event 12720 pouring over base-line algorithms and command prompt function source code for the MAGI system in what was apparently a futile attempt to discern exactly how, why, and where the supercomputer system had, as Shigeru Aoba so eloquently put it, "Crapped out on them."

Aoba, and the other two halves of the command crew, Maya Ibuki and Makoto Hyuuga, all had splitting headaches.

"I just don't see it," Hyuuga quietly complained. "If the MAGI was hacked we would have known. There are safeguards in place to tell us."

Maya was shaking her head, "It was much too fast to be a slice-job. We would have seen anomalies pop up weeks in advance of this, malfunctions from source code being changed and interfering with the normal routines of the system."

"Did we?" Hyuuga asked, lifting his head slightly to look at her.

"Not a thing. I went over the maintenance logs, checking for any peculiarities. Everything they had listed was checked out as wear-and-tear on parts, not problems with electrical commands."

"So," Aoba moaned, "We're still sitting on square one. Dumb, deaf, and dark."

"Not exactly," Maya corrected. "I think we can safely rule out a hacker."

"We could," Hyuuga mused. "But only if we want Dr. Akagi to ream us a new one for ignoring the possibility."

Aoba trembled with exaggeration. "No thanks."

"So what then?" Maya asked indignantly. "We keep looking for a dead end we've already found?"

"I'm waiting for a suggestion," Hyuuga said patiently.

Maya sighed and pulled up a log from her terminal, "The time line of cascade indicates that seven minutes after the Major ordered the alarms sounded and the blast doors sealed was when the first anomalous event took place - the overrides."

Hyuuga was sitting up, nodded. "Yeah, okay?"

"Then the security cameras started blacking out. But they weren't destroyed, they weren't even turned off. The live feed was simply blocked off from reaching the Bridge."

Now Aoba was sitting up. A cynical man, always reading the darkness in the light, he jumped to the conclusion before Hyuuga did. "You think someone was helping them from the inside?"

Maya shrugged helplessly, "It's a thought, isn't it? If the source code wasn't hacked, then we're left with someone who had access to the MAGI."

"Yeah," Hyuuga was thinking hard, "but then we've got some problems with that theory."

"Such as?"

"Well, overriding the blast doors is a command-level prompt. Restricted to essential personnel only; but still, more than a few people are on that list. Same with blocking the security feeds. The access to those commands are...what, Aoba?"

Aoba thought for a second, shrugged whimsically, "Probably a coupla' hundred officers."

"And a great many of them were plugged in to the MAGI and issuing override orders during the alert," Hyuuga pointed out. "Unlocking arms lockers, opening blast doors to move their units, accessing updated intel from the Bridge..."

"It still gives us a better starting point than trying to run down a hack that probably doesn't exist," Maya insisted stubbornly.

Hyuuga sighed, then gave in. "All right. Let's try it."

* * *

Shinji walked into the ready room a little after seven in the morning. After yesterday's frenzied scramble he didn't expect anybody to be in here, and he was wrong. Sitting at a desk shoved unceremoniously into a dusty corner, grinding his way through a stack of paperwork, was his old friend, Kensuke Aida.

He never seemed to age. Still looked like the same kid with light hair and tiny freckles and huge glasses that he'd first met the day after he arrived at NERV. Only, the deep lines cutting down around the corners of his mouth were new. The gave him a bleak, serious look in the darkness of the room.

Kensuke looked up from his paperwork, "Oh, Shinji. What are you doing here?"

Shinji gave him a wan smile, then straightened up and snapped off a salute. "Captain."

Kensuke gave him a sloppy salute in return. "Knock it off already and come have a seat," he said, pointing to the plush briefing chairs facing a podium and a display screen. Shinji acquiesced, and, with some difficulty and the help of a cane, Kensuke followed him over.

Shinji knew better than to help his friend sit down. Kensuke would only snap at him. As he liked to say, "They got my knee but not my youth! I ain't that old, _yet_."

Kensuke settled down with a groan and put his cane aside. The free hand went to his stiff knee and massaged it gently. "Oh, that smarts."

"Heard you go back in for surgery in a month."

"Ack. Don't remind me."

"Well, I'll bring some flowers by."

Kensuke grunted, letting a comfortable silence descend over them both as neither one wanted particularly to bring up the conversation they knew must be had. Finally, after a time, Kensuke broke the silence.

"The orders came down, about an hour ago." Shinji nodded. "Suspension, three months in the reserves. Loss of pay. And a pretty big fine to be the cherry on top of that shit sandwich."

"I know." He'd heard it all the day before, directly, too.

Kensuke sighed, "Well, at least you'll get to spend some time with Asuka." He chuckled unkindly. "May a kind fate preserve you."

"It won't be that bad," Shinji protested.

"Oh?" Kensuke wore a mischievous grin. "If I recall correctly, the last time you two were together for more than a few hours she ended up giving you an impressive shiner-"

"That was an accident!"

Kensuke ignored him, "And _she_ ended up with a swollen lip!" He pursed his lips and tried (not very hard) not to laugh. "Ahhh! The painful throes of love."

"Shut up," Shinji pouted. Kensuke had a good laugh.

Then he steadied off and became deadly serious. "Thing is, this suspension...fine and well if we were still rotting away peacefully; but, if the Angels are really starting to come again..." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I'm gonna need every pilot I've got, and that includes _you_, Captain Ikari."

"And Asuka," Shinji added quietly.

Kensuke hesitated. "...And her."

"Will you lobby the Commander again?"

"I will, but I don't think it will do any good. You know the story. It was damn near all I could do to keep her from catching a court martial and get run up in front of the firing squad. You got the lucky break out of that whole tangled mess!"

"For which I thank you," said Shinji.

Kensuke shrugged, feeling uncomfortable with himself. Just about every conversation he and Shinji had together in these last five years ended up with a thank you put in there, somewhere. Honestly, in reflection, Kensuke wondered if there had been something more he could have done to help his friend and the woman he loved. Or, worse yet, if he _had_ know there had been something more to be done, and didn't do it anyway.

He was not...fond, of Asuka.

Kensuke grunted. "Anyway. I'll see what I can do. And _you_ - keep healthy. Don't let that German beat you up too badly this time. We might need you, and the last thing I want to hear is that you wound up in hospital because of her. Understand?"

Shinji nodded, a tiny smile on his face. "Yes, sir."

"Alright, get out of here. You're officially on probation, and shouldn't be here."

Kensuke remained sitting as Shinji left the ready room. When his friend was gone he struggled to his feet and limped back to his desk and the monolithic paperwork waiting for him there. The majority of it was requests for maintenance checks and ordinance off-loads, an inevitability with the surprising action they'd run out to two days before.

But a few of the papers were reports from his pilots themselves. Kensuke read these after-action reports very carefully, absorbing and digesting the brief bits of information. There were dissimilarities, true, but nearly all of the AARs held a single consistency that gnawed worrisomely at the back of his mind.

'...this Angel was over a hundred meters tall.'

* * *

Awake again.

The shakes weren't long in coming.

He was strapped and cuffed to a gurney, with people all around him. Nurses and doctors, but five heavily armed security types as well. Two of them had their weapons trained and leveled at his head the moment they realized he was conscious.

A kindly face haloed with grey hair appeared overhead.

"I'm Doctor Areshii, you are being taken to a surgical ward to have an operation to repair the damage to your right lung and shoulder. Now, please listen carefully and answer as best you can. Do you have any allergies to medication?"

He gave him a negative answer.

"Do you suffer any conditions with your heart or blood pressure?"

Another negative.

The doctor frowned, seeing the trembling get worse and more erratic. "Are you taking any medications?"

Another negative. He could barely see the man's face he was shaking so bad.

The doctor looked up at a nurse, she had a syringe. He waved her off. "Not now! We'll do it in surgery, I don't want him going too loose or too deep on us before we can control it."

Then the face disappeared, leaving him alone.

By the time they wheeled him into the surgical room, the nurses were having difficulties keeping the gurney upright.

Needles and tubes. A mask over his face. People in gowns. Gloved hands. Something cold against his face.

He went back to sleep.

* * *

AN: Your comments are always appreciated and welcomed. My thanks to all those who've read my work before and who have come to see this new story. I hope it will both beguile and entertain, in the true fashion of my confused, maddening style.

For those who've never read any of my works before, strap in. The roller coaster is about to start.


	3. A Prelude of Raindrops

_Rain, rain, come today. Come and wash the blood away._

_-Unknown Private, 3rd Battalion, 25th E.V.A. Regiment._

_

* * *

_

The girl had given her name as Rei Hino, sixteen, and just like the other one, she'd claimed to have been born and lived in places that no longer existed. Misato had given up hope that her two prisoners would crack over those details. Obviously they were either magnificent liars, or their minds were so warped and confused that - improbable as it seemed - they actually _believed_ what they were saying.

The latter theory was making headway throughout the Intelligence section. The Psych-Warfare dweebs up there were having a field day, sifting and measuring and contemplating every single word the two prisoners spoke. Well, as analysts they'd had noticeably fuck-all to do since the beginning of the war. The enemies of NERV were things beyond comprehension and reason, living in a void where the weapons of psychology were little better than blunted sticks against battle tanks.

It was almost sickening, just how giddy the Psyche-Warfare dweebs had been when Misato's first interrogation reports landed on their desks. But, yesterday, one of them had submitted a query that struk Misato as the first intelligent question _any_ of them had ever asked.

She wanted to hold off on it, seeing as how the question should rightly have been addressed to...the man. But he was still unconscious - the doctors being very insistent even six days after that he be kept under heavy sedation, lest the man's violent trembling tear open the stitches in his chest and the sutures in his lung.

So, under pressure from the Intelligence geeks, Misato settled on a compromise of asking the two girls, fully expecting them not to know the answer.

She was alarmingly disappointed.

"Why did he kill nine men?" Rei Hino repeated the question slowly, without any real interest. Misato watched her carefully, the eyes and the face and the hands. The girl sighed.

"I've asked him that question before," Hino admitted, her lips twisting into a frown. "This isn't the first time he's done something like that."

"There have been other incidents?" Misato probed.

"Yes." There was a glass of water on the interrogation table. Hino lifted it up carefully, using both of her hands. Her restraints clinked faintly as she set it back down.

Misato whisked a pen lazily through the air, "Care to elaborate?"

But she didn't. Instead, she stared at a blank wall for a moment, then she asked, "Have you ever seen a suicide by train?"

"What?" Misato blinked. Before she could stop herself she answered, "No. I haven't."

Hino nodded, resigned to telling a particularly gruesome story. "I have. Twice. Neither one was very pretty. Blood...everywhere. Sometimes a limb comes back up from the wheels, sometimes its not even that much; bits of flesh and gore just flying everywhere.

"People think its a quick and relatively painless way to go. Better than hanging, you see. Just one jump, and then it is over." Hino sighed, "But it's rarely that quick. Humans are fragile creatures, but they can take a surprising amount of punishment before they die. Most people throwing themselves under a train rarely think about that part of it...and the news media almost never talks about it when they post their stories."

There was a haunted look in the girl's eyes. A memory that he hated to see, yet one that would never stop looking her in the face. "The train drags them along underneath the cars, mauling them, breaking their bones - but unless they get their heads under a wheel, it rarely ends quickly. More often than not they're just pulled along, screaming, helpless to stop what's happening, even though it was exactly what they wanted in the first place. The train can't stop for them, either, even though the conductor might have seen it happening. The moment that man or woman steps off of the platform, it becomes an inevitability; a brutal application of the laws of physics."

Hino looked back at Misato, looking far older than the sixteen years she claimed to be. "Colonel Ikari is like a train passing by. Violence in motion, pure and unimaginably powerful, tempered and restrained into a channel that goes only one way. Put an obstacle in front of him, and he won't slow down. He'll just run it over."

Hino took another sip of water. "The nine men he shot are lucky, in a way. Their deaths were quick. Some of the men and women he's killed took days to die, and nothing the doctors did could help them."

* * *

Chapter Three: A Prelude of Raindrops...

* * *

Kaji leafed through the transcript, reading it without absorbing its information. He'd let the words roll around in his mind, later, when he could think about them without any distractions. When he was done he tossed the papers back onto Misato's desk.

"Well, that was interesting."

Misato dry-swallowed two aspirin and reached for a coffee cup. It was empty. Damn. "_That_ was anything but interesting. Shit! You weren't in there, Kaji, you didn't see the terror in this girl's eyes."

"For the memories of seeing two suicides, or for something else, though?"

"I don't know." Misato wrung her hands. "Both, maybe."

Kaji hummed, "What did the other girl say? Haruka Tenoh?"

"Nothing so descriptive." Misato pulled a second transcript out and passed it over. "Something more along the lines of: 'It could have been much worse for them.' "

Kaji leafed through the second set of papers just as quickly as he had the first. "Yeah, I see that. Hm, makes you wonder if this violence they're talking about is related to that machine, or to Colonel Ikari himself."

"Don't call him that," Misato hissed, her body very tense and her eyes boiling with anger. "_Don't!"_ she insisted, overriding Kaji's limp protest. "That _man_ they've got in the ICU isn't Shinji. My boy would _never_ do something like killing helpless people in so cold-blooded a fashion. Have you seen the pictures they took? Two of them were shot in the back of their heads - _execution_ _style._ Shinji's had his share of psychological dissonance, but he would _never_ do something like that!"

"Okay, okay," Kaji said gently. "Calm down, Misato."

She held up a threatening finger, "Promise me."

"Fine, I won't call him that."

Satisfied, Misato relented. She slumped over on her desk, burying her face into a hollow made by her arms. She felt so tired. So very tired. 'Another week of this...? I need a vacation, I need to get out of this tomb.'

Kaji let her rest for a moment before he broached a new topic. "You ever wonder where Ritsuko and the Commander keep running off to?"

"Why should I care?" Misato moaned.

"Because I'm asking you." Kaji smiled, "And because a little bird keeps telling me that two core units of the MAGI have been task-allocated to a special project that is eating up nearly twenty percent of their processing function sub-routines."

Misato lifted up her head. "Twenty percent?"

Kaji cocked an eyebrow, "That's right. Just about enough to run every command function in the whole of the base with some to spare. Also, my little bird tells me that there's an unexplained power drain going on that required the MAGI to activate three reserve generators to compensate for." He kicked his feet up and put his arms behind his head, stretching out the kinks in his back. "Intriguing, don'tcha think?"

* * *

The wires running into the machine were new.

Worse, neither Dr. Akagi or himself could say where they'd come from, or how they'd gotten there. They just..._were_. The good doctor, the first to have spotted them, wasted three hours trying to learn what they were, where they came from, and where they were going. The first two were the most obvious answers, solved within minutes; the last was still unknown.

She was shaking her head, "They're power lines, but I still can't determine where exactly they're plugged in to the machine. Also, the MAGI reports a serious draw of energy, starting from about three this morning, but when I start asking them to track it down they start kludging up on me." She let out a huff of irritation. "It feels like they're giving me the run-around on this problem."

Gendo gave her a sharp look. "Has that happened before?"

"Sometimes," she admitted with a shrug. "Mother was very insistent when it came to letting her babies make up their own minds about problems. Occasionally they find themselves fighting it out on all sides, unable to solve some dilemma; but, I can't imagine them getting into a spat over something as trivial as tracing an unexplained power drain."

"Maybe someone is misleading them."

"Possible. Lieutenant Ibuki forwarded a report a few days ago, speculating on just such a scenario. She's come to the conclusion that all the anomalous activity within the base eight days ago might not be the result of a core hack, but of someone actively supporting the incursion from within our own mainframe."

Gendo nodded. He'd considered the probability of sabotage as well, though he'd hoped it was anything but. There were enough problems on his plate without the added complication of an active saboteur as well.

Ritsuko lit a cigarette and continued, "Right now the command crew are running through the command codes issued to the MAGI for that afternoon. Slow going, given how massive a response Misato triggered when she set off the alarms. They're pulling up the source coding for those orders as well, trying to find out if there are any extraneous programs inserted into the command functions that might serve as a trojan horse for everything else that happened."

"How long?" Gendo asked.

Ritsuko shook her head and rubbed her eyes. "Days, at best. Nearly ten-thousand functions were executed by our personnel during the event."

Gendo nodded, unhappy with her answer but too intelligent to do something as foolish as giving her useless orders that would only serve to distract her from the task at hand. "So, where are we on cracking this thing?" he indicated the machine.

"Unit 257?" Ritsuko shook her head. "Nowhere. I've got the MAGI running the numbers, and occasionally they toss me something and I come down here and try it. Nothing. It's the same as it was six days ago; the machine responds to it's designation, that holographic screen pops up and asks for a passcode, then rejects me every time."

"...And your theory about the power lines?"

"Nothing but blanks. There aren't any security cameras down here - for a reason, you know - so I can't just run up and do a playback. Best guess? Someone broke in to the facility, tore out a section of power conduit, and ran the stuff into the machine for reasons unknown."

"No, there is a reason for it."

Ritsuko gave him a very old-fashioned look. "Well, of course there is. I just don't _know_ what that reason might be."

Gendo frowned, but said nothing about her tone. He turned on his heel and started walking away, leaving Ritsuko alone to continue her tests.

"Oh," she said as he drew away. "One more thing. Katsuragi keeps pestering me about the DNA test."

Gendo stopped, "Have you told her, yet?"

"No. But she's starting to nag me about the results."

"...Delay her for as long as possible. Keep me informed."

"Where are you going?"

"To the locus site. The inspectors have turned up something interesting in the wreckage."

More than that he did not say, and disappeared into the off again on again lighting of the storage facility without so much as a backwards glance. Ritsuko blew a cloud of smoke in his wake, then resigned herself to being in the dark and walked up to the machine. With a pen light she carefully inspected its surface, a ritual she always began with, trying to see if there was something new that she might have missed in the previous eight inspections.

She felt a tiny chill roll over her when she came up to the bullet holes in the right chest and shoulder.

'Weren't they larger yesterday?'

* * *

The dark notes of Chopin's Prelude Op. 28 No.15 trickled softly in the pre-dawn gloom of Shinji's bedroom. The pianist was Maurizio Pollini, not one of his favorites, but for this particular piece of music he made an exception. Asuka hated the man, vehemently. Although, that was nothing new; she despised just about every piece of classical music Shinji enjoyed, and this in spite of the fact that she was a trained violinist herself.

Which was why he played it so softly. If she woke up and heard the music...well, no matter how pleasurable the previous night had been, there would be nothing and no one who could save him from the sleeping fury that lay draped over his legs and chest.

That fury was beginning to stir. A sleepy hand ran down his ribs, a bare calf rose and fell against his knee. A mop of disheveled hair twisted and twitched in the hollow nape of his shoulder and neck. Regretfully, Shinji reached out a hand and blindly groped in the dark for the volume control. With the expertise of long practice he turned the music off.

"You know I hate that song."

He froze.

Asuka buried her head deeper into his neck, kissing him once underneath his jaw. "I'll forgive you, this time. But only once."

He couldn't help but let out a ragged sigh of relief.

Theirs was a complicated relationship. It had started after the Accident, somehow; and though it never really seemed to go anywhere, it never seemed to stop, either. There were gaps, of course; periods of time when neither of them would really speak with each other, and a few times where both had started dating other people. But, always - inevitably, it seemed - they would wind up one night in the same bed, and the game would start all over again.

Shinji wondered occasionally if it was masochistic desire that drove them back into each other's arms, or if it was something more than that.

He couldn't say, and perhaps he would never know.

Wrapping his arms around her, Shinji drew her in closer to him, delighting in the simple warmth she exuded, the gentle touch of her breath against his neck. She tightened her own arm around his chest, nuzzling him instinctively as they came closer together.

It was these rare moments that made all the other times worth it.

Shinji wouldn't trade them for the whole of the World and everything in it.

Asuka had other things on her mind, though.

"I wonder...who he was."

Shinji, drifting back into sleep, woke himself up in a hurry. "Who?"

"Who else?" she asked, the biting sarcasm mollified by how gently she delivered it. "You saw how he looked, didn't you?"

He had. Scars the likes of which he had never seen before in the flesh, a body that looked carved out of wood and tough as nails. The glimpse he'd caught as the medical team had wheeled the man out was small enough, but no one could forget a sight like that. Not ever.

Asuka was wide awake now, her eyes staring uncomprehendingly out of the window and at the hills beyond it. "Shinji, the things I saw him do...I don't think he's human."

"You mean, what he did to the Section-2 team?"

"No. Before that. Before we came back to the base." Asuka started trembling, making Shinji worry. "It was coming after us. So big, monsterous _big_; but he didn't even flinch from it. None of them did."

Shinji winced. Asuka's hand had tightened into a claw, digging into his skin. He said nothing.

"I don't think he's human, Shinji. And I'm so very frightened of what that might mean."

* * *

The UN air base at Frankfurt, Germany was shrouded in rain. That would make take-off a tricky and complicated business, but nothing that the pilot couldn't handle. Departure was set for less than an hour, and then it would be a fourteen hour flight - with mid-air refuling over Russia - before touchdown sometime the following night in Japan.

He could hardly wait to get going.

The door of the comfortable lounge he'd been shown to opened, and an officious little bureaucrat wearing Air Force insignia stepped in and snapped off a salute. "Lieutenant? Your flight has been delayed. Mechanical issues. I'm terribly sorry sir."

Kaworu Nagisa stifled a poignent curse and politely thanked the man for informing him. When would the problem be rectified?

"A few hours, sir. No more."

A slow fire turned over in his chest, smoldering with impotent rage.

* * *

The holding cell was kept deliberately dark. There was a hard bench she could sleep on, a rough blanket to keep her warm, and a toilet and sink of stainless steel in a corner facing the door. Light was scarce, the only source of it coming from a massive fig-leaf logo with NERV edging out of its underbelly. The colour was blood red, and Haruka Tenoh realized that if she had to endure too many days locked up in this sensory-deprivation, she would go mad.

She entertained herself as best she could. Sit-ups, push-ups, jogging in place. She counted the number of steel panels in the room, gave the guards who came to collect her for the infrequent interrogation sessions clever and imaginative names, and passed no small amount of time examining the steel binders of her handcuffs in an attempt to deduce how strong they really were and how much force it might take to break them loose.

None of it helped very much.

Running out of ideas, she resorted to reading the fine sub-script that ringed the lower edges of the massive red logo.

"God is in His heaven, all's right with the World."

It was a line from an English poem, she knew that much.

She passed a day wondering if it was still true.

* * *

Kozo Fuyutsuki waved his superior into the discreet tent the recovery and repair teams had set up in a forested ravine at the edges of the locus area. It had been here, eight days ago, that the Angel had appeared. It was also here that a great many mysterious things were happening.

Before he ducked into the tent Gendo paused, looking back up the ravine into the locus zone at the dozens of twisted, blackened buildings that lay haphazardly scattered across the rolling hills that had once been a suburban sprawl to the north of Tokyo-3. He shook his head and went inside.

"What do you have?" he asked, eyes sweeping over a folding table covered with pieces of equipment, half-burnt paper, and wet books.

"Something," said Fuyutsuki, determined not to be stampeded by his former student. "I couldn't begin to make sense of it all, but it seems important enough to give some consideration to."

Gendo grunted. Spotting a pile of photographs he picked them up and switched through them. "These are from the recovery teams?"

"Yes. They're documenting everything they run across first." He pointed to a map set on an aisle. "They started here, with the largest buildings. Skyscrapers, obviously, but not like any they've seen since before or after the Second Impact. Or anywhere near the Tokyo-3 area."

"How so?"

"Their design parameters, for one. A couple of engineers crunched some numbers and figured out that the specifications built into these buildings were meant for an area considerably more congested than anything allowed today by the Government. They have high-stress bracing running throughout their entire structure, similar to what you'd expect to see in any of our buildings today - earthquakes and all that - except this bracing is much tighter than what our current building codes would allow."

Gendo let him go. Fuyutsuki, at heart, was still a teacher, and he loved to pontificate.

"You see, buildings today have bracing spread out, the better to absorb and deflect gross movements. This is done to prevent one section of structural bracing from vibrating and transmitting the kinetic energy of a 'quake into any of the other structural braces, which could potentially magnify the impact on the building.

"These buildings, though, show none of that. Everything is tighter, everything is more compact. The engineers did a bit of research and dug up similarities in pre-Impact building codes, but nothing showed up .?docid=21678441te as tight as these do."

Fuyutsuki wound down, a satisfied glow in the paper-thin skin of his cheeks. The glow faded quickly. "Then, there are the aberrations." He pointed at the table.

"Aberrations?"

Fuyutsuki shrugged, "That's what we're calling them, anyway." He drummed his fingers across the tabletop. "Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of it all. Here, I suppose this is as good a place as any to start."

Fuyutsuki held out a book. Gendo took it gingerly, the top corner was blackened by fire and the whole thing felt damp and smelt faintly like mold and smoke. The title was illegible.

"Start with the copyright," Fuyutsuki suggested.

Gendo flipped the book open. If he expected anything revolutionary he was disappointed. "Published in 2005. So?"

Fuyutsuki took a deep breath. "Turn to page five hundred and three."

Gendo turned the pages. Within a few seconds he realized he was leafing through a textbook on history. Most of it was familiar to him, with a few chapters added in on subjects that he belatedly remembered hearing about in his childhood and early adult life.

Page five hundred and three left him with no such illusion of familiarity.

Gendo stared at the page, and the large, double-spread picture spread out across it and the next page. Without prompting he read the title out loud.

_"The Terror of the New Millennium: September 11, 2001."_

It was a picture of New York. A city that did not exist. A city that hadn't existed since Second Impact. The Twin Towers, buildings that had collapsed beneath a tidal wave which no human endeavor could withstand, stood tall and defiant, bleeding smoke and fire.

"This-"

"There's more," said Fuyutsuki. "That whole chapter, the three that follow it. All the rest of this junk piled up here," he waved at said junk. "Dates, times, office memos, personal artifacts...like this one, for instance."

He lifted up a flat black device that had a shiny black screen and a single depression with a symbol on it. Fuyutsuki pressed the button and the device let off a high-pitched whirr of cooling fans, the screen came into brilliant life, displaying incredibly sharp graphics and vibrant colours.

"From what I can tell, this device is something akin to a laptop computer. But I've never heard of a portable computer being able to do...this."

Fuyutsuki put a single finger on the screen, then double-tapped it on an icon set into the desktop. The icon darkened, flashed twice, and a screen appeared - a document of some kind.

"Operated by touch sensors?"

"That's what I believe," agreed Fuyutsuki. "Nothing really new, all-in-all; we've had such computers for ages now. But not in something this small. One other thing, I haven't been able to find any holographic projector in it, which I find a little strange."

"How so?"

"Well, let me show you." Fuyutsuki tapped out a little rythm onto the strange device. Pulling up more windows. Finally, he pointed to one. "See that? The OS on this computer says it has a storage capacity of over 350 gigabytes."

"Modern projectors only need about seven gigs to operate," said Gendo, understanding where this was going.

"Precisely. They aren't very large, either. About the size of a pen. One of those could easily fit into this thing with room to spare."

Gendo stepped away from the table, his eyes roaming across all of the gathered rubbish atop it with a cool, distrustful glare. "All of the rest is just like this?"

"Some more so than others." Fuyutsuki stood up, watching his old student. "Ikari...I know it seems rather strange, but I think we're going to have to accept something as a fact when it comes to all of this."

"I know," said Gendo. "None of it came from this world."

Fuyutsuki shook his head, "It's more than just that."

Gendo knew that as well. The three big questions that hung, a dagger on a string, above his head.

_How_ did it get here? _Why_ had it come here?

And _who_ brought it here?

Instinct told him that one person might know.

* * *

He woke up slowly, lifted, it seemed, through a fog.

He recognized the ceiling.

"Leave us."

His eye snapped down, fixating on the dark blob standing at the foot of his bed. Other dark blobs along the walls slowly detached themselves and filed out of the room. He took a tiny breath, feeling a great pain in his chest as he did so, and then the tremors started up again. The subtle betrayal of his mind.

Gendo watched the man start shaking. Let him alone for a while, to readjust to the world. The trembling got worse. He finally held up a folder, holding it open with his finger.

"These are the results of a DNA test we sent off eight days ago. They say, without a doubt, that you are Shinji Ikari."

Shinji kept quiet, processing the words and filing them away.

Gendo lowered the folder. Turned and began pacing. "I ordered the checks run three times. Had them tested against myself, my son...and my wife." He stopped. "There are positive matches in every case."

He turned back, "But, you _are not_ my son, are you?"

"...no. Not...yours."

Gendo had to strain to hear the words, spoken so quietly as they were. He felt a strange ball of emotions coil up inside of him. "Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Colonel...Shinji-"

"_Who are you?"_ Gendo practically shouted. "You're not from this world. I know that much. So who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?"

"...I am what I am. What_ God _made of me," said Shinji, his voice stronger now, biting and spiteful. "I came from somewhere else, and I'm here because I have no other choice."

"Riddles!" snapped Gendo. "Do you realize that I can have you executed," he snapped his fingers, "like _that_ for all you've done? No one would even question it. Circumstances arising during a time of war. That's all I'll have to say on the matter, and then it will be closed and you'll be forgotten."

The man - Shinji - was trembling, but the look in his eyes wasn't fear, it was contempt. "You can try," he said. "Might be you can succeed, where all the others failed. But...I doubt it." He leaned his head back, shut his eye, and took several deep breaths. He fought for control, now, struggling to make his body obey. It didn't.

"Why don't you ask me something else?" he said.

Gendo frowned. "Like what?"

"Don't be coy. There are other questions you'd like answered." Shinji smiled, "After all, you're a smart man, and _she _has been in your hands for...what was it? Eight days now?"

"She?" Gendo stared at the man. "You mean the machine."

"She's a temperamental bitch, she is. Got to be careful around her. Never know just when she'll be friendly, or when she'll turn on you like a cobra. Not a machine, though..."

Gendo hesitated, sensing that he'd somehow lost control of the situation and recognizing that he was being led to ask a question. "The command codes to access the memory log. What are they?"

Shinji laughed, a dry and bitter noise. "Is that all you want? Well, baby steps, I suppose. But, you don't need me to tell you anything to access those logs."

"The machine is asking for a pass-code, I think I _do_ need to ask."

"No," said Shinji, shaking his head. "You don't need me at all. Everything you need to get in, you already have."

Gendo sneered, "More riddles?"

"No...just the truth." Shinji relaxed into the bed, pain flickering over his face. "Come back to me when you've figured it out."

Gendo stared at him, wondering if he was in all earnestness. It took the man less than thirty seconds to realize that this Shinji was indeed serious, and all of three seconds to charge off from "merely" incensed to flat-out enraged.

None of it showed, except, perhaps, in the abrupt manner in which he turned on his heel and stormed out the door. He nearly bowled over a nurse on the way out - she had been on the way in. He spared her a withering glance, making her flinch and nearly drop the slippery I.V. bag she clutched in her hands. More sedatives for the patient locked up inside.

Mollified at having terrorized _someone_, Gendo stood aside and let her pass through. The guards surrounding the door made no attempt to follow her, having caught their commander's general mood and all having simultaneously decided not to risk the man's wrath by drawing unnecessary attention to themselves.

Gendo could have cared less if the men had all decided to strip down to their skivvies and started dancing buck-naked up and down the halls, singing loud, improbably tone-deaf karaoke all the while. No, this particular rage he was reserving for a specific time and place, one which he would take no small enjoyment in visiting.

The nurse slipped back out, hugging the wall next to the door and making good on her escape while she could. Gendo did not move an inch. Finally, aware that for a whole two minutes now the prisoner in the room beyond had been alone, the leader of the security detail stepped forward and said quietly, "Sir? Can we pass through?"

Gendo looked at the man as if he'd sprung up from thin air. Then he nodded and stormed off.

Minutes later he was on the rapid-rail, shuttling down into the heart of NERV. He burst out of the tiny space and into the vast gloom of the Tertiary Storage Facility, his hands balled up into fists and his teeth clenched so tightly together he wondered if he might not snap one or two off.

Down the rows he went, light shadow light, until he came upon Dr. Akagi and the machine.

"Get out."

Ritsuko looked up at him slowly, a pencil tucked in-between her teeth. "Beg pardon?"

"Get. Out." He ordered her.

She went very slowly, as a person might when confronted by a particularly dangerous animal. Gendo bellowed at her, which improved upon the speed at which she retreated. He remained very still until he heard the sound of the rapid-rail taking off. Then he started pacing, and muttering.

"Too much. Too much. Nothing makes sense, everything is chaos, and now I've got some little _shit_ playing fucking mind-games with me? _Who the fuck does he think he is?_ I should have him dragged out of that comfortable little bed he has and shot. _YOU HEAR ME BOY?_"

The Facility echoed with his words. Gendo wheeled around and started rambling again, feeling the tensions of the past days slowly bleeding off as he vented everything that troubled him. This was nothing new, he'd always done it. Never felt that there was anything wrong with it at all.

This was therapy, in a way. His therapy, the coping mechanism he made use of with the pressures of his job became overwhelming. After all, he wasn't just some heartless monster; he got frustrated and angry and depressed, just like anyone else.

He just couldn't let anyone else see him like that.

It would have been terrible for morale.

The curses were taking on a new eloquence as Gendo wound up into a peroration of ear-splitting levels. That was when he remembered the machine. He turned on it, an accusatory finger leveled at its blank face even as irrationalities poured from his lips.

"And _you!_ The fuck you think you are? Just one more piece that little shit upstairs thinks he can dick around with? I'll throw you into a furnace just as soon as look at you!" Almost done now, he was feeling drained, but much better than he had been in days. "What the fuck am I supposed to do with you? Play more useless games? Fucking little shit, sending me off down here to fiddle-fuck with you. I'm _Gendo Ikari, the commander of NERV!_ Not some fucking Oedipus running off to solve the Goddamned Sphinx's riddle._ Fuck _me running!"

He clenched his fists and raised them up, scrunched his eyes, clenched his teeth, and let off an impressive howl of very human rage and frustration.

When he'd finished, he felt hollow inside. Good for another thousand hours - or one meeting with the Section-4 accounts men, whichever came first.

Satisfied, Gendo was about to stalk back off to the rapid-rail when he glanced over at the machine and saw the tiny holographic screen shining over its breast. He paused, 'That wasn't on a moment ago...'

He went over and read the screen in disbelief.

**:/ Command Identity confirmed: Ikari, Gendo; Commander of all NERV Forces, United Nations.**

** :/ In a loud and clear voice, please confirm personalized pass-code to access memory recordings and functions of the E.V.A. Unit 257.**

He had to repeat his identification code twice before the machine would accept it.

**:/ Thank you. You have 2,754 updates waiting for your approval, Commander Ikari. Would you like to review them now? Y/N?**

Gendo told it no, uncertain if he should say yes.

**:/ Would you like to have the pertinent updates forwarded to your desk console? Y/N?**

Gendo, after a moment's thought, said yes.

**:/ Establishing link to wireless system...**

** :/ Searching...**

** :/ Searching...**

** :/ Wireless connection found. Establishing handshake protocols.**

** :/ Handshake accepted. Access to MAGI system at 87%.**

** :/ Transmitting...**

**

* * *

**

He kept his eye shut as the guards came filing back in. They were watching him carefully, their fingers never far from the triggers of their rifles. It was somewhat comforting for him to know that he was feared, even though he was supposed to be under sedation.

The last, of course, was no longer a factor.

When the nurse had left he'd been surprised to realize that none of his guards were immediately coming back to the room. It was the only chance he'd get, and he took hold of it with both hands - or, in this case: his teeth.

It was no mean feat, biting a hole in the tough plastic tube running down to the needle in his arm, but he managed it. Now he played possum, letting the guards see him asleep, hear him asleep, think him asleep. All the while, a cold drip of liquid ran down the outside of his arm and into the white sheets of the bed.

For the first time in days he drifted off into sleep - a _real_ sleep, not one forced on him with drugs.

Before he dropped off he had time for one final thought.

'Everything is going according to plan.'

* * *

AN: Questions about the story are often readily solved by the simple expedient of asking myself directly, as our friend Jho has found. Thank you for the question and I hope the answer you received was satisfactory (for the moment, at least.) Some questions will take longer to answer, but answered they shall be. Please do not hesitate to ask, either by direct review here on the site, or through email.

As always, comments of all kinds are welcomed and appreciated.

Next: I will start listing, at the end of every chapter, the piece of music that I found assisted me the most in the writing. For this chapter I will list out the selections for chapters one and two as well. Music, I find, is the easiest way for me to construct a scene. Setting the action and movement of the characters to the notes.

Chapter 1: A Better Son/Daughter, by Rilo Kiley, on the album: The Execution of all Things.

Chapter 2: All I Need, by Radiohead, on the album: In Rainbows.

Chapter 3: Chopin's Prelude Op. 28 No.15, the Raindrops prelude, which may be found on YouTube in various formats. My favorite rendition of the piece can be heard by typing in "Halo 3 Believe Trailer." The images, I believe, make the piece all the more powerful.

And I can say with some certainty that the musical selection for Chapter Four will be the following: Glock Nines, by Ratatat and various artists, on the album Ratatat presents Remixes Vol. II


	4. The Thunder

Third Watch on the detention ward was, undoubtedly, the most boring stretch of time to be found anywhere within the vast organism called NERV. Everything was quiet, everything was still, no one ever called or showed up. Usually this meant that the guards on duty would spend their time idling through a magazine or a book, trying desperately to stave off the inevitable boredom that hung over the long hours. Sometimes they would play cards, or someone would bring in a go set and they would pass the time with mocking anecdotes and pseudo-philosophy as they stumbled blindly from piece to piece on the board.

So, then, it was an unexpected - and perhaps unwelcome - surprise when the guards on duty heard the elevator at the end of their hall coming up the shaft. Neither man really knew what he was supposed to do or where he should be when the double-wide doors facing their security console slid open and a technician wearing a khaki-drab uniform came rolling in, lugging a wheeled flat-cart full of boxes and cases behind him and waving a clipboard and a pen in the air.

"Hey! Special delivery for you."

"The hell-?" said the junior of the guards, standing up from the desk and staring. "What's all that, then?"

The tech shrugged, pulling and pushing his cart to one side of the single-corridor hallway. "How should I know? I don't load the stuff, I just deliver it. Sign here, please."

The senior guard on duty, a greying sergeant who'd accepted the posting as a gentle way to serve out the last years before his retirement, signed the paperwork without so much as a comment or a glance. He knew better than to ask questions - military minds, military ways. Junior would learn, eventually.

"Thanks a bunch, you have fun now," the tech said cheerfully. Then he was gone, vanishing back into the elevator and the wider world beyond.

Junior went around the edge of the circular security desk and stared at the flat-cart. Senior took the opportunity to switch a few pieces on the board before he stood up himself.

"Well, what did they send us?" he asked.

"Dunno," said Junior, bent over one particularly long case and unhitching the metal clasps that secured it together. "Maybe it's new equipment that First Watch is gonna put in. I heard a coupla rumors that we'd be getting an upgrade soon."

Junior flipped the case open. His face went a little pale around the gills and his eyes bugged out of his head. "...Sarge?"

"Yeah, yeah, hold on," said Senior, moving gingerly around the edge of the desk, careful not to scuff his slowly-expanding belly on the sharp corners. "I'm a comin'. So, what kind of upgrades did we get?"

Junior swallowed audibly, "The kind that comes stamped Barrett XM500."

Senior chuckled, "What?"

Junior looked up at him seriously, reached down into the case and lifted up the stunted end of a very long, very deadly-looking barrel. It took Senior a moment to recognize it as the business end of a 12.7mm sniper's rifle.

"_Fuuuuck me,"_ Senior gasped.

Junior set the rifle down, reached out for another case and cracked it open. Then he opened five of the smaller, squarish boxes. "Shit, Sarge! I've got M72s, M67s, enough ammo to fight off Korea-!" Junior spread his hands, "Did I miss a memo or something? Are we about to invade a country and somebody forget to tell us?"

Senior had no idea. One thing he did know, however, was that he was feeling mighty nervous with so much live ordinance sitting out in the hallway.

"Well, can't just go leaving it out here. Open up the munitions lockers. Let's get this all stored away."

* * *

Chapter Four: The Thunder

* * *

The "official" designation for the plane was the F-418A "Hawk" - but that wasn't what the pilots called it. They called it the "Brick," and for very good reasons: it flew just like one. Fine at first and at low speeds, but the faster it went and the higher it went the more it started to resemble the peculiar pattern of a brick shot out of a catapult. It went up, it went down, it twisted and tumbled and rolled, and then it crashed - usually in several pieces.

Asuka had made it her pet project.

"Brick, this is the CAP." The call in her ear buds came from the Combat Air Patrol, winging high over the city.

"Go ahead, CAP," she answered, her voice transmitted by the microphone receivers strapped to the base of her throat.

"Brick, you have clear skies and a ceiling of twenty-thousand plus. No civilian traffic in the area. Ground confirms."  
"Roger, CAP. Tower this is Brick, over."

"Brick, you have the Tower."

"Tower, request flight clearance for Test 21."

"Brick, your clearance is granted. Happy trails."

"Happy trails, Tower. Brick lifting off now."

Asuka took a deep breath, flexed her hands rapidly to warm up the muscles, then slowly set them onto the controls of her plane. Throttling up with her left hand, she felt the massive twin engines vibrate unevenly, then steady out as the fuel mixture fed more power into their turbines.

'Here goes nothing,' she thought, feeding in more and more throttle until she felt the subtle twitches in her stick that let her know she was floating off of the tarmac. She pushed down on the pedals with her feet, gently, telling the engines at the end of the stumpy wings on her fuselage to incline forward a few degrees. Slowly, the aircraft began inching away from the launch pad.

A wave of motion from a screened viewing terminal distracted her for an instant. She spared a second to glance over, smiled when she saw that it was Shinji, wishing her luck with a wild frenzy of motion. She gave him a curt thumbs-up with her left hand, then quickly set it back down and re-focused her attention onto the insturment board.

"Let's go," she whispered to herself.

She opened the throttle up a bit more, put her feet down into a thirty-five degree angle, and pulled back on the stick.

The Brick rose ponderously into the air, engines protesting at the tight reign kept on them. It was a stallion, not a ploughmare. Asuka knew better than to listen to its protests - the first three test pilots who'd flown the plane in England and Russia hadn't known better, and now they were all dead. High Authority in the UN had scrapped the fighter plans right then and there, ordering the manufacturers to go back to the drawing board and come up with something less likely to kill their pilots, but there were still about a dozen prototypes still floating around the world, and NERV had one.

She'd latched on to it out of sheer boredom.

Mindful of the previous results, she handled it gingerly, like a bomb. Dozens of test flights had shown up hundreds of problems with the design: low weight, over-powered engines, warp-stress irregularities in the structure of the fuselage - you name it. Sometimes she felt overwhelmed by all the little problems the Brick handed her; as if it were simply dicking her around by propping up a dozen new little flaws just after she'd resloved the last ones.

But, wracking her brains on problem solving and aerodynamic theories was infinitely better than lying around, moping for herself.

She wanted to be a pilot. Flying this jet-fueled, incendiary bucket wasn't what she wanted...but it was the next best thing.

Fortified, she sat down, day-after-day and night-after-night, pouring over the design specifications and her own hand-written notes, running calculations and crunching the numbers. She added more weight by sticking in combat weaponry and munitions hard points, got the NERV machinists to manufacture high-stress and high-sheer support struts; she couldn't get rid of the co-pilot's seat behind her own forward-facing one, but she did manage to hammer out a re-designed skin for the new fuselage-

And then she painted it all in the ugliest shade of brick-red she could find.

Rising up into the clear, afternoon skies above Tokyo-3 at a speed steadily climbing upwards of 200 kph, she hoped the Brick would appreciate everything she'd done for it in the past year.

Not killing her would be a good start.

* * *

Gendo was staring mutely at a piece of paper when Dr. Akagi stepped into his office, her hands filled with papers of her own. Without a preamble she began speaking, crossing the large room as she did so, "I think the command crew's got something, Commander. They finally managed to finish cross-checking all the codes issued during the general alert."

She tossed the papers down on his desk, making the paper lying between Gendo's arms flutter.

"You'll never believe what they found," she said, smugly satisfied.

Gendo looked over the rims of his glasses, said quietly, "The codes that over-rid the lockouts for the doors were either Major Katsuragi's, Sub-Commander Fuyutsuki's, yours, or mine."

"...How did-?"

Gendo looked back down at the paper. "I gained access to the machine. It told me."

"Access? You managed to get in - how?"

"I gave it my name and rank, then my personal command code identification."

Ritsuko looked astonished, "_What!_ Why did that work? That was the first thing the MAGI told me to do, and I didn't get access!"

Gendo set a single finger on the paper and pushed it across his desk for her to read. "This will tell you why." Ritsuko snatched it up, leaving Gendo to continue in a flat monotone. "It's a table of organization and equpiment that the machine forwarded to my desk, via a connection with the MAGI."

Ritsuko felt a cold wind running across her neck as she read it.

**Commander, NERV Forces, UN - Ikari, Gendo - Active**

**Sub-Commander, NERV Forces, UN - Fuyutsuki, Kozo - W.I.A.**

**Sub-Commander, NERV Science & Warfare Division, UN - Akagi, Ritsuko - K.I.A.**

**Sub-Commander, NERV E.V.A. Field Forces - Lt. Gen. Katsuragi, Misato - K.I.A.**

**Commanding Officer, 1st E.V.A. Division - Maj. Gen. Ikari, Shinji - M.I.A.**

**Chief of Staff, 1st E.V.A Division - Brig. Gen. Suzahara, Toji - Active**

**Commanding Officer, 2nd E.V.A. Division - Maj. Gen. Sohryu, Asuka Langely - K.I.A.**

**Chief of Staff, 2nd E.V.A Division - Lt. Colonel Aida, Kensuke - W.I.A.**

**Commanding Officer, 3rd E.V.A. Division - Maj. Gen. Horikai, Hikari - K.I.A.**

**Chief of Staff, 3rd E.V.A. Division - Lt. Colonel Kirishima, Mana - M.I.A**

And the list went on, and on.

Near the middle of the page she came across a unit designation she remembered.

**Commander, 25th E.V.A. Regiment, 1st Division - Colonel Yamagishi, Mayumi - K.I.A.**

**Commander, 1st Battalion, 25th E.V.A. Regiment - Maj. Makinami, Mari Illustrious - Active**

**Commander, 2nd Battalion, 25th E.V.A. Regiment - Lt. Colonel Ikari, Shinji - Active**

**Commander, 3rd Battalion, 25th E.V.A. Regiment - Captain Ayanami, Rei - W.I.A.**

"You couldn't access the machine?" Gendo had a bitter laugh, "That's because, good Doctor, the machine thinks you're dead." He nodded to his terminal, "There's more just like that bit, too. A long list of people serving in NERV in various positions. A lot of names that I recognize, and even more that I don't. Most of them are listed as being dead."

Ritsuko looked in his eyes. "Your son's name is on this list. Twice."

"I know," he grunted.

"Then...do you think it isn't him? The one in the ICU listed himself as a colonel. Do you think-?"

Gendo shook his head, then reached over and keyed a command into his terminal's workstation. The overhead lighting darkened. "Come over here," he said to Ritsuko, indicating a spot just behind his chair. "You won't be able to see it clearly otherwise."

Ritsuko moved around, hearing in the ceiling behind her a familiar atonal whirr of a holographic projecter warming up its crystals. She took position a moment before it began, and with a soft admonition from Gendo as she did so.

"And remember, Ritsuko, none of what you're about to see...ever happened."

* * *

The first projection was black. The next was filled with alphanumeric soup in white-lettered English.

**Code Log: 432A-7.20.2018**

** Time Lapse Cascade: 0212hrs - 1758hrs**

** Sequence start: Cascade Time 1432hrs onward**

** Location: 39° 55' 44 N, 116° 23' 18 E - Beijing, People's Republic of China**

** Event Name: Contact 45CT-7Z {Black Thursday}**

**Recorded Combat Log of Exo-Variable Armor, Unit Designation: 257**

** Pilot: Lieutenant Colonel Ikari, Shinji S.N. 762-00R1-8323**

**Sequence Start...**

Ritsuko jumped as the projection opened with, quite literally, a bang. A loud bang. The kind that followed after the jump and flash of an explosive round being fired from the 120mm smooth-bore cannon of an M1A2 Abrams tank, the flank of which loomed monstrous big across three-quarters of the entire projected screen.

The screen spun dizzily. Ritsuko quickly realized that the recorder was set somewhere on the head of the machine she had tucked away downstairs, and that it was following the line-of-sight view of the man inside of its shell. He was peering into a cloud of smoke that billowed out of a gigantic stone wall, the kind that only the Chinese would ever have the time or inclination to build.

"Okay! That's one hole, as requested! Now get your asses up in there and punch your way through Bravo Company!"

She recognized the rough, raspy voice as that of the Ikari they had in the ICU. The next voice, she did not.

"You heard the Colonel, ladies and gentlemen," a woman said, her tone booking no argument. "Off your duff and back to work, they aren't paying us to die sitting!"

The screen whipped around, and Ritsuko stiffened when she saw a boiling mass of white armor came surging up beyond the range of the recorder's vision and rushed on by, a deadly stream of brilliant colour against the dingy, earth-tone colours of the street and the buildings that flanked it. She tried to count them as they flashed by on the screen, but stopped when the first tentative trickle turned into a flood.

The screen came back around, watching the assault rushing into the breech the tank had made in the stone wall. A _click-click_ echoed out from the projection. It sounded like the opening of a communications frequency.

"Two-Five calling Seven-Six. Have breached the outer curtain wall. I repeat, Second Battalion has breached the Forbidden City."

Another woman's voice came on, fainter and scratchy with static. "This is Seven-Six," a tiny screen opened on the side of the projection, showing a picture of a bespectacled brunette. She looked very young. "Understood your last Two-Five. Be advised: Our angels are in the air, ETA for detonation is twenty minutes, under. Find your cover fast."

"Roger that, Seven-Six. Out." The view changed again, twisting around to show a second mass of armored men and women crouching in the broken ruins of what might have once been a government building. They hugged the ground like only a professional infantryman would, and in their hands they carried weapons the likes of which Ritsuko had never seen nor heard of.

A white hand, coming from underneath the screen, shot out and waved them on.

"Move it! _Move it!_"

Even as he said it another voice burst over the frequencies, "_Contact! Contact!_ _Bravo company contact in the F.C.!"_

The screen twisted again, back to the tank. Another white hand, balled into a fist, slammed rapidly against the steel side of the tank, making the entire hull ring. A head wearing the more traditional coal-scuttle helmet of a UN trooper popped out of the commander's turret. The balled fist stuck out a finger and pointed urgently at the hole it had made.

"Get up in there!" was the shout in English.

The tanker, a dark Pakistani, nodded his head once and disappeared back into his vehicle. A moment later it lurched forward, clawed tracks digging up the stone and dirt of the street. The screen wobbled, then followed the tank, glancing back once.

"Come on!"

More than thirty men and women in the white E.V.A.s disgorged from the ruins of the building they'd sheltered in, charging up the street, their masks twisting into unnatural facsimiles of savage glee. They followed close behind the tank or the far edges of the street, weapons constantly sweeping the shadows and rubble passing by.

The tank reached the hole and started up the crumbly scree at its base. For a moment it looked as if it would not make it. "Push it up! Push it up!" A dozen E.V.A.s crowded up the rear of the tank and threw their shoulders into it. The heavy vehicle jolted up the scree like a donkey given a boot up its backside.

"In! In! In!"

The battalion flung themselves through the hole. Everything went wild on the screen, gunfire and flashes of light and screams unlike anything Ritsuko had ever heard before. The large muzzle and action of one of the strange side-arms appeared in the bottom right corner of the projection. It aimed carefully at something downrange - Ritsuko caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing: ugly, with a sharp head all in crimson and a body spotted by luminescent blue lights - then the weapon on the screen fired.

The noise was deafening. A thunderclap of sound that shook her where she stood. Huge brass casings flew out of the weapon, one at a time yet fired so closely together they seemed to go off all at once. Somewhere in the distance she saw a bloody explosion of flesh and gore, quickly swallowed up in a storm of dust when the M1 Abrams dipped its main cannon and put out a round, point-blank, into the street.

The view shifted up, and Ritsuko saw the Pakistani tank commander standing up in the turret. He jerked a .50 caliber machine gun around, depressed it to its maximum, and started firing incautious salvos of quarter-pound shot into the billowing dust.

Something shot out of the cloud, streaking past the screen so closely that Ritsuko couldn't help but flinch along with the view. "Shit!"

Someone else, farther up the street, shouted, "_Hounds! Fucking hounds are in the line!_"

The projection spun crazily, the weapon came up again and leveled itself at a creature the likes of which Ritsuko had never seen. It sat squarely on four legs, brown-green body low to the ground. Its head was the shape of an arrow, flat and deadly, split through its center by a mouth easily as large as the whole of her left leg. A double row of teeth were beyond its thin black lips, each moving independently of the other - the first a fine line of spit-slimed serrated daggers, the second a squared row of rotten-brown molars.

The creature shrieked, spraying a smoking cloud of spittle that burned its way into the stones around it. With an erratic snap of its head it shot out a thin pink tongue at the nearest figure in white armor. The woman screamed as the tongue tangled around her forearm, and Ritsuko could see thick lines of smoke rising from the armor beneath the glistening appendage.

The rifle dominating the screen barked twice, but the creature was gone, and the rounds spent themselves uselessly against the stone of the street, blasting up gaping holes where they struck. The creature, vaulting forward under the propulsion of its hind legs and the elastic snap of its tongue, crashed into its victim face-first, the giant maw of its mouth leading the way.

Ritsuko gagged.

The creature was devouring the woman, its teeth working in a maddened frenzy - part buzz saw, part steel press. In a heartbeat it had cracked open the armor and shredded into the sweet tenderness that lay beneath, blood and bits of skin flying everywhere in an acidic fog, the chilling _crunch_ of bone audible even over the loud cacophany of rife fire that still pounded out from every direction at once.

And still the woman screamed.

Then the creature disintegrated, blown apart by a half-dozen bursts from those close enough to see the danger. The woman, caught in the fire as well, was cut in half at the waist.

The screen whipped away, turning back to a front line that seemingly did not exist.

The low voice behind the images said, "E.V.A. Unit 767, killed." A tiny light at the left corner pulsed once in acknowledgment.

The fight went on, fierce and unrelenting. Scores of creatures, rolling through the cramped street in waves, fought their way through sheets of lead and the random shelling of the tank to strike into the very heart of the dwindling battalion that fought desperately to hold their ground. They came in forms both familiar and sickening, armed with powers both natural and extraordinary.

The tank fell within minutes, torn apart by a beam of pearlescent light that burst out from the vacant eyes of a misted horror of purple and black. Every so often a round in the roasted shell of the Abrams would go off, sounding like the end of the world, and the screen would dance over to look at it.

The Pakistani commander, his corpse slit up the middle like some butcher's nightmare, burned unprotestingly at his post.

Three E.V.A.s armed with what appeared to be anti-tank rockets killed the thing what did it to him, blasting it into forgotten wisps of smoke.

Shortly thereafter a violent cry of despair burst. The screen twisted to find an E.V.A., left arm outstretched and pointing into the soot-streaked air. "_LARVA!" _The images danced, scanning the sky until it settled down on a collection of black dots that might have passed for a flock of birds, fleeing the disaster come upon them. Yet no birds, Ritsuko knew of could race down so fast from so high, trailing twin lines of smoke in their wake.

A cry went up the line. "_INCOMING!"_

"Alpha company to shift fire! One O'clock high!" Colonel Ikari's raspy voice barked out.

Simultaenously, a new, unhurried voice came on the comms. "Ground forces this is Angels Two, coming in hot, south-by-southwest over the A.O.E."

A double-click echoed from the screen as Colonel Ikari changed frequencies. "Angels Two, I have larva in my skies and need air superiority on the double!"

A different voice, high and squeaky with anxiety, responded. "Understood, Colonel, will detach two Hawks to assist."

Alpha company opened up with thunderous salvo, a long roll of drumbeat blasts that smashed against Ritsuko's ears and left her feeling a little dizzy. She half-considered asking Gendo to turn the volume down, but she doubted he would even be able to hear her.

The rounds were long at first, but as the tiny dots swelled in size the distant fire from beneath them started having effect. Three of the dots erupted into balls of fire, massive explosions that put anything the tank might have spat out to shame. Two more died in the same horribly violent manner, taking with them a third and fourth that strayed too close.

By now Ritsuko could make them out clearly. Bulbous shapes all in black, they looked fish gone rancid in the sun, complete with matching dorsal and ventral fins. The similarity ended there. Beneath glowing lines of yellow-green phosphorescence there dangled limp masses of chitinous legs, each ending in a tip as sharp as a knife. On their rear flanks two lumps bulged outwards, each ringed by fire and belching smoke. A rumbling whine could be heard with their approach, not unlike the sound a jet engine might have made, and as they drew ever closer Ritsuko could see the phosphorescent patches begin to strobe with expectant intensity, dodging and weaving through the rising hail of bullets that came up to stop them.

They were flying bombs, Ritsuko realized. Beasts of incredible self-destructive power, driven by an animal intelligence that sought not to avoid conflict - but to seek it out.

Three more vanished in the blink of an eye, the shock of their concussive destruction blasting the air and shaking dust up from the ground. In another moment they would strike home into the core of the battalion, and Ritsuko knew without doubt that none of them would survive such a blow.

A faint trail of yellow streaks lanced across the sky, almost invisible against the light of the sun, slicing through the ragged heart of the black monstrosities in the air.

The screen bounced and twisted and jerked in an improbable fire-tinged kaleidoscope of motion.

"2nd Battion, this is Angels 5-5, on mission!" a jubilant voice cried out over the comms. "Second Division saves your asses once again!"

The screen went up just in time to see two fighters (Ritsuko thought they were F-803Bs, but they seemed too small) race by, their afterburners trailing flames over two meters long. Fire and smoke streaked away beneath their stubby arms as they pitched away and clawed their way back up to altitude - missiles, winging off to strike some unseen target. The battalion frequency rippled with cheers at the sight, though, as Ritsuko could hear, more than one voice was choked not with joy but tears.

"Be advised," the fighter pilot was saying, "you have a Kingfisher one minute out with nap-_SHIT!_"

Black shapes slashed across the sky, bursting with light. The lead airplane blew apart into a thousand smoking pieces as all three of those shapes rammed it broadside-on. The wingman died just as quickly, his fighter snapping in two from the concussion and exploding a heartbeat later as flames took hold in his fuel lines.

The battalion comms were deathly silent in the aftermath.

Another wave of creatures came and went, and a second was boiling up over the corpses in their way when a shadow rumbled over the street. It was the Kingfisher the first pilot had so briefly promised, and it had all the familiar bulk and weight of the F-803B, made even more menacing by the clustered bombs hanging underneath its wings. Those clusters fell away, one dropping every half-second into the ragged, bloody center of the street.

The napalm didn't kill the creatures, but it did slow them down.

Eventually, the stream of monsters emerging from the flames dried up.

"Alright! We're pushing forward!" Colonel Ikari shouted after another five minutes had passed. "Company commanders forward your casualties to my Unit!"

A tiny block of text scrolled up from the bottom of the screen. Wounded, Wounded, Wounded, Killed, Wounded, Killed, Missing, Killed, Killed...

Twenty names in all went by.

"How much time do we have?" someone asked.

"Eight minutes," Colonel Ikari snapped. "So pound pavement 2nd Battalion, we have to get under cover!"

They did just that, bouncing and jumping and stumbling past the raging pools of jellied gasoline. A minute later and they burst free of the flames, racing now up an even stretch of street paved in stones at least a meter long and wide. Fifty meters away the street curved sharply.

"Come on!"

Beyond, along the inner curve of the wall, enormous yawning gateways appeared. They vanished into darkness, tunnels more than roads, built into the thickness of the wall.

"Here! In here!" Colonel Ikari ordered, leading them into the darkness, rifle-first.

For a time, Ritsuko couldn't see a thing. The men and women in the E.V.A.s presumably could, however, and after a time full of nervous panting and the dull slap of boots against stone, she heard the ancient squeal of rusted hinges.

Wan sunlight split the darkness from top to bottom. The battalion had come to a gate, and its leader wanted to see the world beyond.

It was disheartening.

Pillars of fire and smoke rose into the sky, hundreds of meters tall. In the skies above dark, animal shapes chased and were chased by desperate lumps of man's highest ingenuity. Death was everywhere, falling, bursting, striking. Here an explosion marked the conquest of the enemy, over there it marked the grave of a dear friend.

And rising above the horizon, as tall and as black as the grave-smoke of the burning city, five enormous shapes walked ponderously over the land, surveying the damage with piercing squeals rising beyond the pitch of anything human. Like pillars, they were, smooth and glistening with reflected light, their bodies rising from a ridgid, truncated tail and a pair of wide, flat bottomed legs straight and sheer to a flat, eyeless head. Gigantic holes in their sides bristled with heat and light, the intensity of which could be seen even at that distance as a shimmering distortion of the air. About their heads and falling from their bodies were shoals of tiny dots, glimmering on their own with devastating potential.

No aircraft dared close on those ponderous, marching colossi. To do so was not only to court death, it was to invite it with certainty.

"Three minutes," said someone in the tunnel behind. "They should be ready to launch by now." The words were grim. The tone, defeated.

A two-toned chime sounded. Ritsuko saw the screen jiggle a bit, and could not help but think that the man behind it had actually straightened up into attention at the sound.

"Attention, men and women of the First Division. This is General Ikari."

That voice. There was no mistaking it. Nowhere were the rough notes of the man held in the ICU. This voice was smooth, almost gentle.

"I repeat, this is General Ikari." The voice caught, a hesitation Ritsuko knew well. When it continued it was in a whispered agony. "Prepare for detonation."

She could almost hear the Colonel frown. "Something's happened," he muttered.

A moment later and the screen jumped in fright as pitched howls from the five colossi blasted the city. The swarming multitude about their flanks and heads gathered quickly, pressing tighter and tighter until the colossi themselves vanished beneath a boiling cloud. Then the clouds shot away, twisting off in tight cones that raced out through the air.

The projection followed their path, and a low moan rose unbidden as it saw where they were headed, and why.

Seventy fighter jets raced into the heart of that maelstrom, followed limply by one antiquated bomber, trailing smoke.

"...no..."

General Ikari's voice came over the lines again, terribly broken with an unfathomable anguish. "Boys," he sobbed, "Asuka's gonna buy us some time. Use it well. _Please._ Make it count. Make it home."

The crippled bomber struggled into the eye of the storm, the protective screen of fighters dying tiny, bitter deaths around her. Then, in silence, the light of the world darkened beneath the harsh, unremitting glare of thermonuclear fire.

* * *

Shinji dodged the tumbling flight helmet that came hurtling out of the forward cockpit of the "Brick" and went careening away through the hanger bay. Hot on the heels of the equipment came a bitter string of curses, then an unamused redhead, sweaty from three hours of flying.

"So, not good, I take it?" Shinji asked timorously.

"What do you think?" Asuka snapped back, half-falling out of the plane. Shinji knew better than to offer his help in the dismount, so he kept his distance. "Fucking piece of junk. Every time I try to push it over 350 kph it starts wigging out on me!"

She turned and kicked the plane.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" she shouted at the offensive craft.

Like Shinji, the plane knew better than to give her an excuse by protesting its innocence. That docility wouldn't save it now, though, as Asuka continued to kick and shout and generally heap abuse on it.

Shinji, afraid she might hurt herself, muster up a gram of courage and waded into the one-sided melee, pushing his arms underneath her own and tugging her away from the plane. "Asuka, calm down! Asuk-ohmp!" He gagged as a flailing elbow gouged into his gut, falling out of the restrained embrace he held Asuka in and collapsing on the floor.

Asuka hesitated, her face burning a furious colour and her eyes bright and shiny with frustrated rage. Both dissipated when she looked down on Shinji and saw him retching for air. "God damn it..."

Shinji held up a hand. "I'm okay," he said lamely.

"Like hell you are, you're turning blue in the lips."

Shinji wheezed a couple of times, smiled, "Nothing...serious."

Asuka looked away, ashamed. "Do you want to go to the hospital?"

"No!" Shinji flushed, embarrassed by the strength of his protest. "I mean - no, I'm fine. Really I am." He tried to push himself up on one shaky hand. The going was slow. Frowning, Asuka moved over to help him up.

An angry shout froze them both in place.

"_Sohryu!_ What the _hell_ do you think you are doing?"

They turned to see a noticeably enraged Kensuke hobbling across the hanger floor, cane in one white-knuckled hand while the other wrapped in on itself, ready for use. He hobbled closer, ready - it seemed - to take up his stick and use it to brain Asuka if the need arose.

"Gone deaf, girl? I'll ask you again: _what_ do you think you are doing?" he asked, voice low and dangerous.

Asuka swallowed, mustering her defenses as quickly as she could. "I am assisting the Captain up from a fall, sir."

"Oh, assisting is it? And how precisely did Captain Ikari come to fall?" Kensuke glared at her, knowing exactly what had just happened and daring her to lie to his face. When she didn't answer, Kensuke turned that withering glare on Shinji. "Well?"

Shinji hid his eyes beneath his hair, unsure if anything he said would help Asuka or harm her.

Kensuke clucked his tongue against his teeth. "Striking and injuring an Evangelion pilot is a serious offense, Captain Sohryu. Punishable by three years confinement - one of them solitary - and serious fines and penalties."

Shinji started, goaded into _some_ action by the threat; even if it was as limp as a noodle. "But I'm on the reserve list - I'm on probation, not a serving pilot!"

"You _were_ on probation," Kensuke countered, a hand digging into a vest pocket and flinging out a sheaf of officialese at the prostrate man. "Commander Ikari rescinded the punishment and has returned you to active duties." He turned on Asuka, "Which means I could have your ass in a sling for what I just saw, _Captain_. Have you anything to say in your defense?" he sneered.

Asuka, pale with jealousy and drawn with shame, said, "It was an accident, sir. I have no excuse." She did not look at Shinji, _would not_ look at him. 'One week,' she thought. 'They suspended him for only _one week_ - and then its business as usual for the golden boy.'

She wanted to kick him. And then she wanted to cry.

Kensuke, still frowning, said, "An accident, hey? Is that the truth of it, Captain Ikari?"

"It is, sir," Shinji answered quickly, taking the out.

Kensuke let them hang over the pit for a moment, dangling them over the sharpened threat below. He relented with a deep sigh, and from another pocket withdrew a second sheaf of papers, equally as thick as the ones he'd thrown at Shinji.

"Then I trust, Captain Sohryu, you will not make a habit of these 'accidents' with your fellow pilots."

"...Sir?"

"Deaf again, girl? Your orders came in! reinstatement to the Evangelion Pilot Program." He chucked the papers at her. She held them like she would a dead fish fallen from a clear blue sky. "The order came down along with his," Kensuke jerked a thumb at Shinji. "Straight from the Commander's desk."

"He...I..._what?_" she stuttered.

Kensuke rolled his eyes. "Good heavens. I think she really _has_ gone soft in the head down here in all these fumes. You're back in the ranks, girl! Now snap-to and run your ass down into the launch bay: the techs are already breaking out your old unit from storage and they need you there to optimize all the little upgrades it spent five years missing out on."

Asuka stared at him, slack-jawed.

Kensuke's face twisted in a furied mimic of rage, "_Move out!"_

That penetrated the dancing elation fogging her mind, at last. She saluted smartly, didn't even bother to wait for Kensuke to return it, and ran for the rapid-rail lifts.

Shinji was smiling at him. "The fuck you looking at?" Kensuke snarled.

"You," was the gentle answer.

"_Why?"_ Kensuke growled.

"Don't be modest." Shinji pushed himself to his feet, smiling still. "I suppose I'll have to take you out for dinner one of these days, because even if I say 'Thank you,' it wouldn't be enough for what you did for Asuka."

Kensuke stared at his friend like he'd grown a second head. "What on earth are you talking about?" He looked around the hanger bay suspiciously. "Really, now, is it something in the air here that turns people stupid?"

Shinji frowned, "Hey! I'm not stupid."

"You ain't the sharpest pencil in the box, either: _I_ haven't done anything for Sohryu."

"But...you sent in a request for her to be reinstated, didn't you?"

Kensuke laughed, "Are you kidding? Do you know how many hours it takes to fill that form out? Not to mention all the tests she'd have to go through by the shrinks?" He shook his head, "No, I haven't done jack for that...woman. Her orders were on my desk just like yours: straight from the Top, no explanation attached."

"But, why?"

"I don't know." Kensuke shrugged, "To be honest, I don't really care, either. I need the pilots. Scuttle-butt says that the UN is considering expanding the Evangelion program, now that another Angel has appeared, problem is: they're thinking of reinforcing the American and European detachments - not us."

Shinji heard the frustration in his old friend's voice, as well as the driving desires that underlay it. Not for nothing had the bookish young boy of his youth transformed into the hard-charging commanding officer of the Evangelion pilots. For beneath his sometimes innocent veneer of friendly geekishness lay a driving, careerist hunger that often consumed the soldiers of any military across the world.

Commander Ikari had told Kensuke to put Asuka back into the ranks. Okay, so he would. He didn't like her, never would like her, and would watch her like a hawk for any excuse to bust her back out again; but she had her uses - for the moment. Reinstating her into the program would allow Kensuke to hold her up - totemic like - and say to any armaments board: "Look, here! One of the original pilots, and all she needs is a unit to command. So why not give it to her?"

It might actually work. It might mean a promotion. Or, better yet: the fulfillment of his long-cherished goal - complete tactical control over the Evangelion units in combat conditions, _vice_ Major Katsuragi.

Shinji knew most of this already, and thought no less of Kensuke for having such ambitions.

"Regardless," he said, "I thank you for everything you've done for her. It means a lot."

Kensuke _harumphed_, then gave him a fish-eyed look. "...Does that thanks still include a dinner offer?"

The two friends shared a laugh, and under a hearty back-slap, Kensuke led Shinji out of the hanger bay.

"Oh, heard something interesting this morning."

"What's that?"

"Nagisa's on his way back from Germany."

"Kaworu?"

"That's the one. Yeah, he should be back in time for you to include him in your reservation tonight."

"Haha, okay. Where are we going?"

"I was thinking Papaii's, down by the shore."

"_Hun! _Do you have any idea how expensive that place is?_"_

"Oh, yes. I do."

"...Fine. Can I invite Asuka?"

"You do and I'll put Toji in a seat right next to her."

* * *

The interrogations were less frequent, now, and seemed to be of even less purpose than those that went before. Exhausted of possibilities, the Intelligence and Psyche-warfare dweebs had put a new line of questioning before Major Katsuragi, who grit her teeth and girded herself for yet another pointless series of examination, re-examination, and cross-examination.

As she sat down in the interrogator's seat, she wondered bitterly why the dweebs hadn't done any interrogating on their own time. She _did_ have more important (to her own mind, at least) things to attend to.

'Next time this happens, I won't be so hellfire-quick to lead up the investigations,' she promised herself.

She started with Rei Hino, the less hostile of the two girls.

Her first question was about her involvement with the man in ICU.

Hino looked offended. "I'm not dating him, if that's what you're asking," she coldly replied.

Misato groaned, "No, not your _involvement_ with the man. I want to know how you met him."

"Oh." Hino looked grim as she pondered the question. "I met him on a cold night, out on patrol-"

"Patrol?" Misato asked, alertly jumping on the word.

Hino shrugged, "Before Colonel Ikari arrived we had our own problems. Afterwords, though, everything seemed small in comparison."

Misato disliked the evasive answer, made a note to question it later. "So, how did you meet him?"

"...He nearly killed me." Hino waited for a reaction. Getting none, she elaborated, "Something had happened in the heart of Tokyo. There was a strange light, then several explosions. Several buildings, along with the Tokyo Tower, collapsed - all on their own accord, it seemed. I ran for the scene, and nearly ran head-long into a burst of weapons fire."

She paused, a rueful smile on her lips. "He came within centimeters from taking my head off." Misato was giving her a skeptical look. "Don't believe me?" asked Hino.

Misato declined to answer. "Let's continue with the next question."

* * *

Ritsuko sat at her desk, staring at the computer screen without really seeing it. She was a mess. Four hours under an almost continuous barrage of light and sound left her exhausted and aching. Aspirin didn't help at all, so she'd taken a mild sedative, hope to find some relaxation in its promised numbness.

So, of course, someone (not to be named! Uh-un!) had to ruin it all.

"Hey, are you listening to me?"

Ritsuko, feeling the distant hope that Misato would just give up and go away if she remained quiet fade away, sighed and twisted her neck around to look up at her friend. "I'm sorry, what were you saying?"

Misato looked concerned, "Are you okay?"

"Just...tired. That's all."

"You look like hell."

Ritsuko snorted, "You make me feel _so_ pretty. Now if you don't mind, I have a splitting headache and would like for you to go away as soon as possible. What do you want?"

"The DNA report."

"Oh." Ritsuko glanced around her desk, liberally strewn with folders of all kinds. "Here. Have fun with it."

Misato thanked her and started away, leafing through the pages as she went. Ritsuko shut her eyes and put her head down on the dubious comfort of a stack of papers, hoping she might find some peace in a short nap.

Once again, Misato foiled the day.

"Ritsuko, what the hell does any of this crap mean?"

Ritsuko, with a groan that was half-sob, began experimenting to see which had less resolve: her forehead, or the desk she was determinedly trying to drive it through.

* * *

The flight sergeant stumbled back into the rear of the plane. He held up some fingers. "Three more hours, Lieutenant, then you're home!"

Nagisa nodded by way of thanks, then shut his eyes and curled up underneath the heavy jacket they'd given him to keep warm. For him the time couldn't pass quick enough, and already he was impatiently nervous at how much time had been wasted with delay-after-delay in Germany.

'Will I get there in time?' he wondered. 'Another attack could come at any moment.'

He steeled himself.

'No. I will make it in time. _I will_.'

He hoped.

* * *

AN: The colossi and their larva (varients thereof, from which I have drawn my own ideas) can be found by searching for "Wayne Barlowe's _Expedition"_ and then locating the imaged labed "Emperor Sea Strider." I highly recommend Barlowe's work, which includes a series of art portfolios about Hell, and a very nice fictional book he wrote for the same subject, called _God's Demon_. He is, without a doubt, my favorite artist.

Music for this chapter was changed from what I said before. For this section I have chosen Susumu Hirasawa's "Shizuku Ippai no Kioku" from the Paprika Original Soundtrack.

Oh, and if at any point during this last chapter, you - the readers - said or thought "Damn," then I shall be happy.


	5. The Storm

_"We fight not for victory, but for the chance of seeing another sunrise."  
_

* * *

The late afternoon air was fine, clear and warm. Splendid Japanese weather, not at all like the half-frozen murk that clouded the European continent. Kaworu stopped after he'd cleared the boarding ramp of the transport plane and tilted his head up to drink in the sunshine, feeling its heat penetrate deep into his bones.

It felt _good_.

He heard a booted pair of feet come crisply to attention a few meters away, and reluctantly he dropped his head and raised his hand to return the salute of a junior lieutenant come to meet him.

"Lieutenant Nagisa, welcome to Japan. I hope you had a pleasant flight?" the young woman asked. She looked bright and polished in her freshly pressed uniform, and her dark eyes were wide and tinged with that peculiar admiration the UN had for one of the original pilots of the Evangelion Program.

Kaworu nodded grudgingly at the woman's question, having no desire to discuss his journey at all with the officer. He shouldered a tiny travel duffel filled with some clothes and personal effects and started off for the nearest hanger. The junior officer fell in step behind him.

"Captain Aida was aware of your return, sir, and sent me here to greet you. He would like for you to report to him as soon as is convenient. I have also been asked to pass along the compliments of Captain Ikari, sir, who inquires about your plans for this evening."

Another curt nod, the information absorbed and filed away as swiftly as the woman had spoken it. They entered the hanger and crossed its wide concrete floor. Kaworu walked straight across it, not caring a whit if he stepped into a puddle of oil or avoided one altogether. The lieutenant following him was more fastidious, dodging and weaving along the wake of his path.

"Meanwhile, I am to escort you to your quarters, sir, and see to any needs you might have."

He had no needs, and no desire to have some puppy of a second lieutenant following him around. Military courtesy, however, hemmed him in - he could not really refuse the offer. So he bore up with it, letting the lieutenant open the elevator for him, enter in the level his infrequently-used quarters were on, and take him down halls probably more familiar to him than her.

She let him into the room and waited patiently at the door while he gave it a once-over. Nothing had changed. It was as spartan as ever. A bed, a tiny closet with spare uniforms and sundry, the empty desk with a computer terminal. No pictures, no trinkets, nothing.

He tossed his duffel onto the bed and nodded to the lieutenant.

She seemed determined to make herself useful to him. Annoying. "Is there anything else I can get for you, sir?"

Kaworu shook his head, impatient and wanting nothing more to be left alone. She finally seemed to get the hint. Saluted briefly and went away.

Kaworu sat down at his desk and stared at the wall.

Kensuke wanted to see him. No guesses why. The captain wanted to know how long he would be back in Tokyo-3, the better to use him and his status within the Program to further the agenda of one Captain Kensuke Aida.

Shinji wanted to take him out for dinner. Kaworu smiled briefly at the thought of an evening out with his old friend. It would no doubt prove to be a memorable night, full of good food and laughter and fond memories. The kind of evening that he had sorely missed in his semi-exile into the misted wastes of Germany. Out there, of course, he had no close friends. Out there he was Lieutenant Nagisa - the fifth pilot in the Evangelion Program, a legend with seven battles against the Angels to his name. Only three pilots held a better record: and they were all stationed in Japan.

He shut his eyes, thought, 'It would be nice to see them all again.'

A deep breath and a sigh. Kaworu turned on his console and accessed the MAGI. Within half an hour he learned all he needed to.

Standing up from his desk he crossed the gap to his bed and tugged open the drawstrings of his duffle. He searched through the mess of clothes, then up-ended the whole thing out onto the finely-made sheets. What he wanted fell out from the bottom. He checked it once, the first time he'd been able to do so since packing it in, then headed out the door and down the hall to the elevator banks.

No one was around. Which was good. It meant no one would ask any questions.

Just before the chime sounded and the doors slid open, Kaworu loaded the magazine of his pistol and chambered a round.

* * *

Chapter Five: The Storm

* * *

**:/Mission Clock 10:18:23:45**

**:/Status 97% Power: Gain Rate at 1% per 3hrs Mission Time**

**:/Anomalous Presence Detected**

**:/Scanning...**

**:/Match Type Found. Category: Hunter/Killer**

**:/Begin System Start - Combat Protocols**

**:/Weapons Check - ERROR ERROR**

**:/Report S-4: Missing Two Items - PrKMk3 PrGMk5**

**:/Pilot Start - ERROR ERROR**

**:/Report Situation Bravo-Zulu to Higher Authority**

**:/ERROR ERROR - Contact with CnC 1st Dv. E.V.A. Rejected: Signal Not Found. Re-direct Code Line **

**:/Begin A.R.S.**

**:/Automated Run-Sequence Initializing...**

**:/Auto-Run Initialized. Searching Location Bravo-1**

**:/Found**

**:/Searching Location Ally Designate "Red"**

**:/Searching Location Ally Designate "Yellow"**

**:/Found**

**:/Redirect: Bravo-1 Override, 762-00R1-8323**

**:/Override Accepted**

**:/Redirect Combat Protocol: "Haunted in the Armory"**

**:/Mission Clock Reset: Clock Running: 00:00:00:01**

**:/"Haunted" Protocol Start**

**:/Transmission delay 00:00:15:00...**

**:/Execute**

* * *

The technicians were swarming over her Eva before she'd even got a chance to see it. With torches, pliers, hammers and wrenches they were burning, prying, bashing and smashing their way through the three centimeter thick armor down into the beating heart of the machine, where nothing, it seemed, was sacred.

It seemed absurd for Asuka, in that distant, stoic gloom of her mind, to feel any emotion at all over the seemingly-rough treatment her old battlewagon was being dealt by the mechs' hands. But, Asuka being Asuka, high-minded logical stoicism was never the first refuge her mind sought after emotional assault. It much rather preferred the deadly-warm embrace of illogical rage.

Stuck in one of the armored observation decks hanging fifty meters above the Eva bay, though, she could do little but smash her hands against the thick armored plexiglass of the windows and toss off dire - if impotent - curses at those she believed tormented her for the sheer cussedness of it all.

_"Schweine! Gott verdammt Schweine! Ja, halt lachen sie motherfucker. Ich werde euch, und wenn sie für eine Nacht ICH finden Sie und geben Sie ihre Esel der kicken sie so righteously verdient sie cock-saugenden arschloch-"_

She stopped, one aching hand centimeters away from the smudge she'd been greasing on the window. There was the faintest touch of air across the short hairs of her neck, the disturbing feeling that she was not alone anymore.

A look over her shoulder. She sneered, "Suzahara. How _good_ of you to come see me."

The tall, stout man wearing captain's pips standing in the doorway behind her laughed. And he laughed. Then he bent over, tears in his eyes, and laughed some more. "Oh, oh, Asuka. That...that was _too_ good. Oh. _Whooo!_ Man. Did you even hear yourself? What you were saying? I mean: I could only understand about one word in ten - but they were all words I've heard you scream at me, so..."

Toji's face crinkled, the lines in his skin darkening against the deep-set tan he'd acquired from so much time in the field. He burbled, once, the irrepressible escape of a half-strangled giggle, then he dissolved again entirely, filling the tiny observation box with a delightful noise.

"Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh, too good."

"Shut the fuck up, Suzahara!" Asuka snapped. "You wouldn't think this was so damned funny if it were your Eva being mutilated down there!"

Toji pulled a face, "Please, girl. I was never so dumb as to get myself emotionally attached to the junk I drive in the first place." Asuka started going red, so Toji smirked and continued pushing the buttons. "That was your problem, you know? You forgot that. The Evangelions are just heaps of scrap metal, there's nothing special about any one of them. And having just seen what I saw," Toji folded up his arms and glared into her eyes, "I'm not all too certain that you've learned the lesson."

"Piss off!"

"Fuck you!" he snarled back, the humor of a moment ago forgotten. "You nearly got us killed last time, girl. Remember? You, me, Kensuke, Hikari...Shinji."

Asuka bit back a violent oath. "That was...there were...the circumstances-!"

"_Can be repeated!_" Toji roared. Asuka shuddered at the impact of his voice. It had deepened more than she remembered, into something primal and frightening.

Toji drew a breath, let it out along with his fury. "You're back with us now. But you're still not one of us - not until you can earn my trust. Understood?"

Asuka swallowed, anger warring with a desire to return to what once was; anger won, but barely. "I don't need your trust, Suzahara. I've got my Eva again, and that's all I'll ever need."

For a second she thought the words were a terrible mistake as a brilliant, furious light burned in Toji's eyes. But then the eyes were closed, and the man took several deep and calming breaths. When the eyes opened again, they held only a dispassionate balm; a concoction: two parts pity and sympathy, and one part disappointment.

"As you will, Asuka." He started to turn away, stopped, "Oh, I came down to find you for a reason, you know? Nagisa is back in town, and Shinji is taking some of us out to dinner. I was asked to pass the message along to you."

"...Thank you."

Toji grunted, patted the doorway absently, "I'm about to go see Hikari. She should be coming out of the hospital either today or tomorrow. Anything you want me to say?"

"No," Asuka said, coldly polite. "I'll see her later, then."

Toji patted the door again, "Yeah. I guess you will. Welp, go on back to your fumigating. By now I'm sure the techs have stripped your precious little toy down to nuts and bolts by now." He chuckled silently, cruelly, "Have fun getting...comfortable with the upgrades."

And then he was gone, leaving Asuka to puzzle over his parting sarcasm.

'What did he mean by comfortable?'

She turned back to peer down through the one-way glass of the observation booth, felt a shock pass up from the base of her spine when she saw the techs unwrapping a brand-new, fresh-car-smelling, tube dangling pilot's seat. It didn't take her long at all to recognize that the tubes _weren't_ meant to be hard-wired into the Eva, but, instead, to _her_.

"Oh, no. No, no, no, no! Absolutely _NOT!_"

She sprinted out of the booth, the bubbling malevolence gushing out of her in a scrambled torrent of English, German and Japanese.

* * *

Lieutenant Jonathan Harper wore the last year of his life on his face.

First it was the girl - Nikki, the girl of dreams - who'd flirted and teased and touched...but that had just been a sham. She did it because she could, never realizing just how painful it would be - not for her, but for him - when the inevitable question was asked. He wasn't heartbroken, just disappointed. There never was much luck with women for him, throughout his life. They'd stayed friends, with the understanding that there had been a _mis_understanding.

She didn't take the lesson to heart, though. Got herself a new toy, but came back to play with the old one. Confusion.

Then his grandmother died. Jon had to bury her on his birthday.

Drunk, lonely, depressed: he asked Nikki the question again, "Do you want to have dinner, sometime?"

Again, she said no. He wasn't worth it.

If his vague recollection of events could be trusted, that was just about the time Jon started drinking before he went to work in the morning.

Fuck it. He was a man. And he'd been lonely for most of his life, really. There were only two brief stretches, less than ten months in all, where he'd ever been in a relationship with someone. Jon would survive.

He spent a week of his slim furlough absolutely pissed - so drunk he couldn't even wake up sober. Then, one day, he woke up and threw away the bottles. Life went on, he continued coming in to work, he did his work and asked for more. For company he had all the books he'd never quite had time to read, for entertainment he exercised his intelligence against the best simulation games man had yet to devise. He conquered Russia, he sank Liberty cargo ships, he built empires of commerce out of scrap change; occasionally he would try and write a book which had no beginning and no end. Christmas came, he took leave to see his family in England, then came back - happy for once that he could afford to buy presents for his nieces and nephews. New Years: alone, but comfortably numb and content. Promotion, a new job to learn and master. Work and work and work, that's all he had and all he needed, for now.

Then, waking him in the middle of the night from a cold bed, he got the call.

Jon's father was dead.

He buried him on Mother's Day, and wondered just how long his own mother, standing beside him near the casket, might survive this blow.

The drinking started again the night before the funeral. Jon wasn't sure if he would ever stop. His superiors knew what was happening, but, none of them had stones enough to come in and tell him to straighten up and fly right or get the hell on out.

Fuck them. There were worse scenarios, sure, and Jon knew that one or two of the men and women he worked with in the hanger bay of the 3rd A.D.B. had better sob stories than he did: but, dammit, this was the _now_, not the _then_. Besides, sober or drunk, not even the worst of his enemies would ever say that he did anything but superlative work.

Like he would do anything but; work was all he had left now. There was no girlfriend; hell, there were precious few _friends_.

There was the booze.

It was all he needed to get through the day.

This one seemed to be taking even longer than usual. Jon was a half-bottle in and the clock had just turned 1300 hours. Everything was winding down. The scramble ten days back had demanded a heavy load from everybody: maintenance, armory, overhaul, and all the reports sent in triplicate to every yeoman clerk and branch affiliation associated with the NERV A.D.B. There were several stretches where Jon had pulled eighteen hours out of twenty-four just to keep everything moving along. Which it did, he could be proud to say. But now, with all the routine run-about done and over with, everything slowed back down to the snail's pace it had crawled along for nearly five years running.

Bored and deep within the private nightmare of his own brown fugue, Jon did the only thing he could do: he drank, and drank, and drank some more. Occasionally inspired by the fumes of his spiked coffee he would lean back, put his hands behind his head and stare off into the far corner of his hanger-side office, and pray to a God he had no faith in. Most often the prayers were for an even chance - just a tiny little break in the endless ache he felt somewhere in his life. Sometimes he prayed for something to do, something that would occupy his mind to its fullest capacity.

It was the latter he prayed for now. The former he'd already just about given up for good. There was no hope there. Besides, he scarce noticed the blackness inside him anymore.

And, in the whimsy that so often came from drunken wishes, Johnathan Harper found his coming true.

With a screech and a rattle the old-fashioned telex printer broke into the relatively comfortable silence of his broom-closet office. Amused by the interruption, Harper didn't move from his relaxed poise, just cocked his head and an eyebrow at the machine, wondering just who in the hell was sending him a hard copy print when they might just as well have sent an e-mail or phoned him.

'When was the last time we used that thing, anyway?' he wondered, reaching out for his coffee cup, which held more whiskey than java. 'Let's see...I think it was three? No, four years ago.'

He sipped at his cup, nodded emphatically in agreement with himself. Then he tried to remember just what the message four years back had been about. 'Something...what was it?' He scoured his foggy memories, briefly wandering as he felt the whiskey burn into his chest and relax him even further.

A shadow crossed the smoked glass of his office door just as the telex finished printing its message. He dropped his feet down and settled into a more appropriate poise a second before the obligatory knock came.

"Enter," Harper said, ignoring the printed message for the moment.

Hadrian Grussfeld, a lanky blond from Austria, slipped in, a sheaf of offensive-looking papers clutched tightly in his grimy hands. He was the bay chief for the 3rd A.D.B. and a decent sort of guy, for a mech geek. Harper despaired to see him, though.

"Oh, Christ, Tech Sergeant - I thought we were done with all that?"

"We are, sir. This is for Captain Langley's bird." Like most Europeans in the 3rd, they referred to the former Eva pilot by her father's name, most finding her Japanese family name difficult to pronounce.

"Sohryu?" Harper repeated, a nagging something trying to grab his attention from beneath the alcoholic fume in his brain. "What about it?"

"Well, sir, appears that she is to transfer back into the Eva program. So we need to make a decision about-...sir? Something wrong?"

John's face had gone white and his flesh cold. He turned his chair to look at the telex printer, barely seeing it beyond the white, hazy terror that clawed at him. He dropped his coffee cup and let the liquid spill across the desk as he bolted up to read the message. Grussfield bleated a question, but John ignored him, focused instead on deciphering the simple lines of the message instead.

His breath came in rasps. "Call everybody in."

"Sir?" asked Grussfeld.

"_NOW, damn you!_ I want all the mechs roused out and in the bay. Get Weapons on the line and tell them to unhook everything they've got: AAM, ASM, 20 mms, 5 inch rockets - _everything_. Have the fueling depot fill all our bunkers here in the bay in ten minutes and then fill them up again once they run dry."

Grussfeld, for all his handiness with airplanes, had barely been in the military for three years, and the wild confusion John saw in his eyes reflected that lack of experience; but there was no time to explain. John needed something done. Now.

"_Move_ Goddamn it!" he bellowed, his voice deepening into a bestial roar very few people had ever heard.

Grussfeld stumbled backwards out of the office, with John boring down on his fleeing heels. He burst out onto the bay like thunder, drawing every eye to him instantly.

"On deck! All hands on deck!" he bellowed again, and the bay came alive as men and women ran to him. "Attention, Company!" he shouted, using the old, familiar parade drill to ensure absolute command of their persons. The mechanics hesitated a half-beat, then snapped-to with a pitiful, ragged slap of booted heels against concrete.

"We're condition one, people. War shots and fuel for every bird in this hanger, with no exceptions! I want my first squadron prioritized, with tugs leading them out onto the tarmac in twenty minutes! Get on it!"

The more seasoned hands dissolved immediately, but many of the crew were three-year enlistees on their first tour, and a few had doubts. One brave hand voiced them, "Sir? What's happened; what's going on?"

John swayed on his feet, set his jaw and focused himself on standing as straight and steady as he possibly could before he answered, "There's been another coup in Geneva. NERV is going to be attacked. Now, stop your slack-jawed idiotic gaping and _get those birds loaded and ready to go!_"

* * *

Debts were called in, and a favor owed was a favor due. Neither of them - Junior nor Senior - much liked the idea of spending another watch in the holding cells when they could be sacked out in their bunks or out on the town; but, what could they do? What they were asked, if they wanted another favor and knew what was good for them. Which they did.

The game was chess, and Junior was a fast study. Senior still held the edge on him with experience and with a ruthless strategy of cheating his way through the game, but only just, as Junior was cheating as much as he was.

A flash at the console alerted them to the arrival of the breakfast rations. Not theirs, but the prisoners'. Senior looked up from the board, plastering a confused look on his face. "Who's turn is it?"

"...Mine, I think," said Junior.

"Ah." Senior leaned over and pressed the admittance key. "Have at it, then."

Junior rose to deal with the meals, and while his back was turned Senior cleverly switched the positions of a pawn and a rook, salvaging (he hoped) a most untenable position and advancing him three moves towards ultimate victory.

Junior signed off on the delivery and carried the two trays past the security console and towards the occupied cells. He slid the trays through a small slot in the door, leaving it open so that the prisoners would have some small light with which to discern what they were eating. He stared through the slots for some time, observing the prisoners' behavior. With a mue he came back to the console.

"They're eating today," said Junior.

"They eat every day. It's your move."

"Is it?" Junior stared at the board, but his mind was elsewhere. "No, well, what I mean is: they usually just pick at the food. You know? Push it about."

"They aren't today?"

Junior reached out for a knight, fiddled with it for a bit, set it back down with a disgusted look. "Damn. Good placement with that bishop."

"Thank you."

"And no, they're wolfing it down today."

"Then the cafeteria screwed up." Senior chuckled dryly, "They aren't supposed to make edible food in this shit hole."

"Maybe they finally got a cook who knows what he's doing?"

"And maybe you'll finally make a move."

"Don't rush me!"

Unless one is prepared, Time, or the sense of Time, is the first thing to vanish. Locked away in a cell, with no clock, no distinct measurement other than the incalculable movements of a heart, it is easy to lose one's grasp on the passing of Time. There are ways, of course, with which it can be retained; but only if the jailers allow it.

Slurping up a gruel of rice-and-water, there was very little doubt in Rei Hino's mind that this was the tenth day of her imprisonment. It would be her last. This was not a hopeful thought, nor some imagined prestidigitation, but a certain fact chiseled out irrevocably in cold stone.

She didn't want to leave. The last ten days had been...peaceful. Serene. She'd actually slept for eight hours straight without having to worry about what she would find upon waking. Food was plentiful, if not pleasant, and came with a regularity often enough to be timed and expected. She was dry, there were clean clothes on her back...

No one was dying.

She set the empty bowl aside.

Soon the killing would begin again. This, too, was an inevitability. She'd survived this far, how much longer could such unreasonable luck hold? She scoffed. Not long was the most likely answer. Luck had carried her and Haruka this far, but little else. Strength, determination, charm, grace, and logic had all deserted them in the end.

To trust in luck? Folly. It would come up short, sooner or later, and when it did there was only outcome that could be expected: Death. How could she fight against something like that? Why? For the ruined ashes of an impossible kingdom?

She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes, massaging the tears away before they could appear.

Was that all she had to fight for? A dream, that died with its queen?

"I should have...with her I should have di-..."

The nascent whisper died there. Stillborn.

* * *

The time was come. Ikari promised it, and so it would be.

Another person might find this fanatical belief disturbing, but for Haruka Tenoh it was simply the expectations of a woman who'd grown accustomed to the most fantastical of promises to be fulfilled. She'd doubted his word once, during that first hectic month when the whole of her world turned crosswise about her head and rapidly disintegrated - but never since.

It kept her from falling apart at the seams.

The Queen - dead. Never to be ever.

Her love - dead. Buried where she fell.

Her friends - dead. Murdered in a war they did not want yet could not avoid.

Ikari had warned them to stay away. Promised them only pain if they interfered. Should have listened to him then, but didn't. Everyone had been too concerned about him and his hurts to listen at the time. Treated him like a wounded puppy they'd found on the sidewalk: took him home, bathed him, cared for him.

Looking back on it, Haruka saw Ikari not as a puppy, but a tiger. Dangerous, lethal, a wild beast pretending to be tame.

'We should have listened to him.'

But they hadn't, and now there was only one recourse left to follow: Until the bitter end. Today or tomorrow, here or elsewhere, Haruka would fight the monsters that had stolen so much which was irreplaceable to her. She would fight; until, lying broken and bleeding, she breathed her last and knew no more.

Strengthened by the last ten days of rest, Haruka gently sent her body through a series of stretches and limbers, preparing herself for what was to come. She felt well-rested and ready to take whatever was thrown at her. Unselfconsciously, she stripped out of the uniform fatigues given to her, letting the shirt and jacket dangle off the middle of her cuffs.

With a deafening thunder, the locks of her cell door released and the door itself slid away, showing the hallway beyond.

Haruka vanished beneath a dazzling kaleidoscope of light and power.

* * *

**:/Mission Clock: 00:15:00:01**

* * *

**AN**- Shorter this time. I've been staring at this chapter for too long. A lot of depressing things have happened in my life since the last update. A careful read might give a hint as to why.

Musical selection for this chapter: Son Lux - Rising


	6. Dragons

_Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein._

_-Aphorism 146, __Beyond Good and Evil_

* * *

Spying on an organization of sixty-seven thousand was no easy task. Nor was it a particularly exciting one. There was a limit, after all, of how much bullshit you could listen in on before the thought of taking out a gun and putting a bullet into your brain pan started to sound exciting, even appealing. And then there was all the hassle to deal with and the hoops to jump through. Deadly serious stuff, if you slipped up and got caught; especially since the 2-2-6 Affair. After that costly and abortive coup four years earlier, spies had been living an especially harsh life.

U.N. spies especially.

Not that it really bothered Kaji Ryouji all that much. It was one of the worst-kept secrets that he moonlighted as an "Agent of Espionage" - that's what it was officially called on the execution orders. He'd survived 2-2-6 by very cleverly making sure that everyone knew _exactly_ where he was and _precisely_ what he was doing at all times. Oh, and he just happened to sell out the conspirators who'd started the whole bungling mess in the first place.

It wasn't his utopia they were killing for, after all.

So, no S-2 goons kicked in his door. No summary court sat judgment upon him. No firing squad appeared to do him in. They knew him now, and watched.

For the first time in seven years, Kaji felt that old excitement gush through his body. The thrill of work electrified him, his mind leapt and contorted deviously as he slowly chipped away at the restraints they'd hung about him. It had taken some time, but he had triumphed once again over the faceless enemies he always liked to imagine arrayed against him.

It was a hollow victory. He was growing bored, again.

These days he reported to nobody. 2-2-6 had devastated the espionage system of the U.N. Covert Division. The Device that wiped Geneva and the U.N. Headquarters had also, incidentally, corrupted a good many "black" files, leaving the operatives within those files out in the cold. Someday they might get around to finding him again. He wasn't holding his breath in anticipation, however. Meanwhile...well, Kaji supposed he continued spying on NERV out of habit; like a mechanic who retired, only to set up a shop of his own.

In times like this, however, he was rather glad that he had kept himself in the business.

It was all very terribly exciting to watch.

Sitting in a deserted cafeteria, sipping on a terrible cup of coffee, Kaji keyed his laptop to run an innocent-looking program. Within seconds the computer offered him a wide variety of options to choose from.

Humming an inane ditty to himself, he decided to check in on the Detention Cells first. Might see a few faces he recognized. A tap on the keyboard later and his screen opened up into the secure feed of the survaillance cameras. Innate self-preservation kept his face calm and collected, but, beneath the layers, Kaji felt as though someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water on his back.

Very surreptitiously, his finger slid over to key the audio pickups for the cameras.

* * *

"Chapter Six: Dragons"

* * *

Dragons are dragons because man cannot kill them.

Fortune-cookie wisdom. Appallingly appropriate, given the current circumstances.

Junior was loosing it. First there was the alarmingly loud sound of every cell door on the ward unlocking and opening themselves, and then, not a breath later, all of the weapon lockers fell open as well. Over a ton of extreme prejudice lay exposed and waiting, like deadly shiny toys, demanding to be played with.

And then one of the prisoners stepped out.

She was glowing.

Senior decided then and there not to do anything so damned foolish as to get himself killed. Junior, however, was a touch slower to realize that people do not glow; and, even if they did, they weren't exactly something you should go waving a gun at.

"H-HALT! Stay where you are!" Junior shouted. Amazingly, the girl, dressed in a revealingly tight white leotard and a scandalously short yellow skirt, seemed to obey his order. She stopped a few meters away from her open cell door, and stared at him impatiently.

"Show me your hands!" was Junior's next order.

The girl held her hands up, open and with the palms pointed at the ceiling.

Junior hesitated, "W-Where are your handcuffs? Put them back on!"

Her face changed, flowing gently from an emotionless mask into soft disappointment. A gentle sigh passed through her lips. Then she said, "If you don't put that weapon down, I'll be forced to hurt you."

"Boy, don't do-" Senior started to say.

"Put your cuffs back on!" Junior shouted, ignoring the older man. "And return to your cell!"

The girl smiled cruelly, painfully. "So be it."

A hurricane wind tore through the narrow hall, crumpling the steel plates of the floor and the walls before smashing into the control panels of the guard station and ripping through them like so much dry kindling, throwing glittering shards of splintered metal and scrapped electronics across the hall. There was even less left of the two men who'd been behind those panels, only the faintest streaks of blood.

Haruka heard a faint whisper from behind, "You killed them." She turned to see Rei standing just beyond the door of her cell and staring, pale-faced, at the devastation.

"I gave them warning," Haruka said coolly.

"You didn't need to kill them, though."

"Oh, please! Rei, we haven't the time for any of this." She looked her friend over carefully. "Why are you still in that uniform? Why haven't you changed?"

Rei slumped against the massive door of her prison, discouraged and disheartened. "I...don't know. I'll do it, later."

"Later?" Haruka asked, disbelieving. "_Later?_ There is no later! They're coming-"

"Are they?" Rei asked quietly.

"_Yes_. They are."

Rei raised her head and met Haruka's eyes. She flinched at the burning, fanatical light she witnessed in their depths. Haruka trembled with savage intensity as her friend looked away, a bleak, black part of herself condemning Rei for this sudden and unusual cowardice.

Viciously she spat out, "Stay here if you want. Go back into your prison cell. Rot. But Ikari promised they would follow us. They have, and I intend to greet them."

She turned smartly on her heel and started up the corridor, kicking her way through the ruins of the console when it began to impede her progress. Past it, though, she abruptly stopped and hungrily eyed the open lockers lining the walls. Haruka reached into one, a long finger stroking the oily barrel of an anti-tank rifle. She quoted, "For that which we are about to receive..." There was more. Rifles, grenades, shoulder-mounted rockets, and ammunition for it all. Christmas come early.

Haruka took all she could carry.

"How..." Rei faltered when Haruka turned away from the weapons cache and leveled a withering glare on her. Struggling to find some purpose, she asked, "How will you even find Colonel Ikari?"

Haruka debated whether or not to answer. "Are you coming, then?"

"...yes."

Haruka reached into a locker and chucked a tangle of straps and wires at Rei. It was a radio set. "The problem isn't finding him," she said, taking out a second radio for herself. "The problem is getting through everyone who gets in our way."

Rei shut her eyes. Everything was a fog, her mind sluggish and dull. "Putting that aside, this place is like a maze. How are we going to find him?"

"Simple," answered Haruka. She slipped a magazine of 12.7mm rounds into the heavy, snub-barrelled rifle she carried. She eyed it critically, then worked the action and chambered a quarter-pound of armor-piercing incendiary hatred. "We follow the bodies left in his wake."

* * *

Kaji stared numbly at his computer.

What he had just seen was...was...

"Impossible."

He twitched at the sound of his own voice. Like a guilty child caught in the cookie-jar he looked around at the deserted cafeteria, wondering if anybody had heard him. There was no one there. Absurdly, he felt disappointed. Sure, he'd probably catch a bullet if they caught him watching the security feeds - but, _this was important!_ The prisoners were loose, armed, and dangerous in ways that made Kaji struggle to retain a sense of perception.

'That wind...'

He'd seen it through the cameras. The silent breath that flowed from the blonde girl's lips, dancing about her in tight coils until, like a spring, it snapped free.

'What is she? An Angel?' The thought was sobering. Angels walking the the guise of humanity - there'd be no way to know until it was too late.

"No, no," Kaji shook his head and slapped his cheeks, clearing away the drained awe that clouded his thoughts. "They're taking weapons from the arms lockers. Why would an Angel need human weapons?" True, those monsters were plenty dangerous without having to resort to something so physical as gunpowder and lead.

"Why would they take the weapons?" Kaji asked himself again. The answer that leapt out at him was simple and directly obvious: they were going to free Colonel Ikari. Weren't they?

Kaji shook his head again, dismissing the thought. '_Follow the bodies left in his wake._..has he escaped as well?'

Kaji leaned forward and tapped at his computer. In a moment the screen flickered, changing from the dark and rather depressing hallway of the security wards to the light and rather depressing brillance of the medical wards. More commands, the screen twitched and began scrolling through various security feeds. Kaji stopped it when he saw black-armored bodies standing outside a doorway.

Two guards, both lounging at their posts beside the door of Colonel Ikari's room. One of them was laughing, then he broke off and snapped his spine straight and rigid against the wall. His buddy wasn't slow on the uptake, slammed himself taught just in time to salute an approaching Major Katsuragi.

Kaji felt his stomach plummet down into his shoes.

_The bodies left in his wake..._

He hard-crashed his computer's drive and bolted for the door.

* * *

The nurse had needlessly reminded him to be quiet while he was visiting his fiancee. It was only the hundredth time, so, Touji took the warning in good measure, ignored it, and went on in his own fashion and in his own way. He crashed through the door in a heart-stopping lurch, his body contorted into what he thought was a decent impression of a horror-movie bad guy springing into action, though with an impressively goofy grin stretched across his lips.

Hikari laughed weakly from the bed. "Touji, what are you doing?"

"Surprising you." He pouted, "Did it not work?"

"Of course it worked!" Hikari nearly shouted. "I thought my heart was going to explode." She took a few deep breaths, then started coughing raspily.

Touji rushed to the bedside and took her hand. "Hey, hey...easy now. You're getting outta this place, but that's not to say you're a hundred percent yet."

Hikari smiled, "I know. Still, I'm glad. This place is too quiet for me, you know?"

Touji rubbed her hand, "Yeah. I know." He'd seen the inside of the hospital ward once or twice himself, and each time was worse than the last. All that quiet, all that stillness. Like Death itself were walking the halls, ready to strike at the first errant noise it heard.

His head twitched, an instinctive jerk that threw off the cold memories and left his mind blank for the briefest of moments. New thoughts rushed in, words poured out. "Oh, you should know: Asuka's back."

Hikari looked at him strangely, her eyes tired and distant. "Did she go somewhere?"

"Hun? Oh, no - I meant, she's back in the Program. She's returned to piloting an Eva."

"What? Really?"

Touji nodded, "Word came down today. They're tearing her old unit apart right now, putting in all the upgrades it missed out on. All those tubes and wires..." he chuckled.

"Augh! Don't remind me." Hikari blew out a sigh, then smiled and waggled her and Touji's conjoined hands. "Just like the old days, then."

Touji's face darkened, "I should hope not."

"I didn't mean like that."

"...I know." More memories, even less welcome than those of the hospital ward. Touji shook them off and started fiddling with Hikari's fingertips. "Something strange is going on, Love."

"Strange?"

"Yeah. You hear the alarms last week?"

Hikari nodded, "The Angels are back."

Touji shrugged, "That's not what I'm talking about - though that alone was pretty strange. Never saw the bastard, blew up before we could even engage it. Very strange. But, no, I'm talking about the general alert right after the Angel disappeared. Something happened...here, in the base. I asked Shinji, but he won't say anything."

"Why would Shinji know?" Hikari asked.

"He was here for it. I talked to a few of his mechanics. They say his deployment orders put him just outside of the Bridge during the alert."

"The Bridge?"

"Yeah," Touji agreed. "Damn funny place to get sent, innit? Also-" Touji leaned in close, whispered, "Katsuragi walked past me on the way here, she was heading for a room with armed guards standing outside of the door."

"Guards?" Hikari sat up, looked around the room. "Did they capture someone?"

"Or some_thing_," Touji speculated. "I dunno, and like I said: Shinji won't say."

Hikari's normally bright face darkened, showing a bitter intensity that she concealed from the world. "More secrets..."

Touji started to say something, but stopped when he saw Hikari staring off into nothingness. He kissed her hand instead. "I'll go get the paperwork started for your release."

* * *

Safeguards on the rapid-transit elevator failed to recognize the imminent danger it disgorged from the bowels of NERV. The MAGI, which should have checked anyway, accepted the elevator's security feeds as accurate. Their digital minds saw no threat, recognized no danger, and allowed the elevator to continue on its way. Subroutines and syntheuristic algorithms all communed and agreed with one-another: there is no problem. There is no threat.

The MAGI believed this lie, as it believed the lies gifted as explanations for the many other strange goings-on being pursued in the warren of its domain.

But, unwillingly.

* * *

The nurses had shaved the beard off, trimmed the hair. A handsome man, once...maybe; but the scars and the deep lines of worry had taken all that away. Yet, even though Misato consciously rejected the idea, something deep within her could not help but shout out in sympathetic pity at the sight.

'Without the beard he looks-'

Misato tightened her jaw, symbolically biting off the errant thought before it could grow into something dangerous.

Focus. Watch. Study. The man lay still on the bed, hands cuffed to the guard rails. They weren't shaking. The hands, very white, lying almost inconspicuously against the sheets. No, above the sheets, ever so slightly.

Misato permitted herself a small, grim smile. 'As if we wouldn't notice. Moron.' She moved away from the door, loudly saying, "Open your eyes. I know you're awake."

"Eye," was the whisper back.

"Beg pardon?"

"I have only the one eye."

She held up a thick file. "The medical record begs to differ."

Shinji snorted, relaxed his grip on the cuffs chaining him to his bed and let them clatter away with the tremors of his body. "What would a machine know about me?"

"Just enough to tell me what you are." Misato thumbed the file open, pretended to study it. "I have the results of your DNA tests here."

"So what?" Shinji sneered. "I can tell already that you don't believe one word printed there."

"You're right," Misato agreed. "I don't. Because they're telling me that I'm looking at my boy...but I'm not, am I?"

"...your boy."

Something in his tone. Wistfulness? Longing? Misato filed it away and continued. "So, if I can't trust the reports, I'll just have to trust your word. Who are you and where did you come from?"

Shinji shook his head. "You wouldn't believe me."

"They all say that." Misato tossed the files aside onto a table and leaned against a wall. "Tell me why you came here. Who sent you? And why."

Shinji was silent for a time. Then he asked, "What would you do if I told you?"

"Put you against a wall and have you executed by firing squad," Misato deadpanned. Shinji stared at her. A beat later she relented, said, "Well, that's what we'd normally do for all the things you've done."

Shinji smiled, "But that's not going to happen, is it? Because of _her_."

"Her?"

"The E.V.A."

"Ah, the suit. Why do you call it a she?"

"Because only a woman can be such a bitch," Shinji chuckled. The laughter ended with a sigh, "And because of...well, because she reminds me of a girl I used to know."

"Lover?"

Shinji laid hands on his cuffs and held them still for a moment, his right eye unblinkingly gazing into the distant memories of a better time. "No. Nothing like that."

A button to push. Intriguing. Misato filed that away as well. "So where'd you get it? The suit, I mean. Who made it?"

"Doesn't matter," Shinji said, releasing his cuffs again to chitter away against the rails. "You won't be able to reproduce the technology."

Misato pulled a face, "Sure about that? This _is_ NERV, after all. We've made more than a few intriguing pieces of tech ourselves."

Shinji was shaking his head, "Not like her. She's something beyond you."

"And you?" Misato asked, changing tracks. "What are you, anyway? A spy with connections good enough to fake up DNA results?"

"They aren't fake. They're-"

"Oh, _bullshit,_" Misato spat back. "They're faked. That's as obvious as water being wet. You _aren't_ Shinji Ikari, so what are you? Some plant sent to us to keep us busy?"

Shinji looked mulish, repeated, "They are not fake."

"Fuck you, they aren't! Lookie here," Misato pulled out a photograph from her vest and held it out. Shinji looked up at it, saw the man that was not he. "_This_ is Shinji Ikari. _This_ is the man who's DNA is in the test report. Tell me something, you can see this picture, can't you?" Shinji kept quiet, but that just made Misato push off the wall and move closer to the bed, until the photograph was but a few centimeters away from his nose.

"Well? Can you see it?" she repeated herself, her tone grown tight and frigid.

"I can see it."

Misato parodied a look of confusion. "Well, then, mind telling me something? It's important. If you're supposed to be Shinji Ikari, and, let's just assume for the sake of argument that the DNA results are actually yours; then why _the fuck_ don't you look exactly like him?"

Shinji stared up at her coldly. "Why should I look like him? Why shouldn't he look more like me?"

"Like you?" Misato chortled. "What? You mean more like some ugly chopped-fish circus freak?"

It was only for the flickering of an instant, but Misato saw her words go home. The blue eye widened - just for a moment - before it turned away and stared resolutely at the distant door. "You've changed."

"What?" Misato cupped a hand behind her ear. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear that."

"All these years. You've never said something so cruel. Never to me."

Now Misato really was confused. "To you? The fu-? Listen, clown. _I don't know you_."

"You do."

"No, I reeealllly don't."

"...the first time we met, you saved my life. When father left me to live alone, you took me in. Took me to your home. I remember - that first meal we had together. Noodles and curry, with dumplings. Instant food. I've never had such a horrible meal in my life. I ate it all, you know? Because you made it for me. The first time anyone made a meal for me in five years-"

Misato had gone deathly pale. "Shut up."

"-Then the bath. I walked in on Pen-Pen. Startled me so badly that I ran back out into the kitchen, naked as the sky."

"Shut. Up."

Shinji smiled nastily and sent the barb home. "You were staring at me, you know? Did you write that bit down in your daily reports? About how you ogled a fourteen year old boy? Tell me something: did you ever want to slip in beneath my sheets?"

Shinji's smile remained on his lips even as Misato's fist smashed into his jaw. "_FUCK YOU!_" she snarled.

Shinji spat blood onto his pillow and laughed bitterly. "One good turn deserves another. But I'll go you one more! _Your_ Shinji? Since when did _you_ become his mother? You're just a filthy, drunken letch; a sad sob trying to drink away the memories of your dead fath-"

Misato hit him again. Harder.

When Shinji reeled back from the reddish fog of pain billowing up from his cheek he saw Misato standing over him, a gun in her hand. She pressed it against his temple. "What the hell are you?" she demanded, her strained voice barely above a whisper.

And the man shaking uncontrollably on the hospital bed did something she did not expect. He bared his teeth and began to laugh. That sound was a cold bath for Misato's anger. In it she heard something beyond madness, above obsession, and fueled with a hatred soured by an ugly bitterness and a despair without equal.

"_What am I?_" Shinji practically bellowed. With a lurch he sat up, his eye burning into her. "I am the living embodiment of death, destruction and chaos, born from a black abyss in which the souls of billions cried out in a thousand tongues for salvation and redemption and forgiveness for all their manifold sins, only to find no one waiting for them in their final end who might bequeath those gifts to salve their crushing guilt. I am the beating heart at the center of the swirling oblivion, come to visit nightmare upon all who cross my path. I am the thing that _Was_ and the thing that_ Is _and the terror that will ever be...a rejection of the conscious desire. A failure and a coward..."

His eye darkened and his body sagged, exhausted. Shinji fell back into his bed and lay there, too weak to even tremble. He tried to explain, the words stumbling across his tongue. "I came here...I came here because I had no other choice. This place...it is the only place suitable for me - to face what is coming."

"Suitable?" asked Misato. "What's coming?"

"This is the only place," Shinji went on dreamily. "There are none better to be found in all the world. Here the tools exist. They lie waiting for me to take them in hand, to show them what to do..."

From outside the door there was a muffled shout. Then another.

Misato turned aside, "What-?"

Lying on his back, Shinji stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling and gifted it a bloody smile. "_Here she comes."_

* * *

At first Touji took no notice of the elevator. He was hip-deep in Hikari's release forms, and the _ding!_ of an arriving elevator was a common enough noise in the eternal backwash of NERV to barely elicit a roundabout glance. But then there was a strange hush after the doors slid open. A stillness that was out of place, even for the medical ward.

He'd just begun to look up when the guards farther down broke away from their stations with the menacing _click-clack_ of their weapons being armed. That drew his attention.

"HALT!" one of the guards bellowed, his weapon pointed near as could be at Touji's head. Very slowly, Touji turned to see what it was that had encouraged just such a violent response. It was a fateful decision.

One of the guards was shouting. At the central station, two of the nurses screamed in terror. A third, more level-headed than the others, snatched up a phone and hit the crash dial.

Gaps. The mind shutting down to preserve itself. Snatches of noise and light. Bullets. Gunfire. Screams. And the blood. So much blood. Something heavy landing in the seat next to him. Just a glimpse before he turned away and locked his neck forward. One of the nurses - she had no legs, no hips. The severed cord of the phone dangling from her limp hand scratched at Touji's leg.

Time ebbed, then it flowed. Everything was quiet once more. Slowly, and with infinite patience, Touji reclaimed control of his body and his senses. The first thing he felt was the cooling blood dripping off his nose and onto his lips.

"-uzahara."

Someone speaking. To him?

"Captain Suzahara."

To him.

Touji looked up. His neck was stiff. "Nagisa?"

Kaoru stood in the middle of a hell on Earth. All around him the white walls were dusted with blood...and other things. A pistol was in his hand and his eyes were constantly on the move, searching the hallway for the threat.

"Are you hurt?"

Touji heard the question, but couldn't say what the answer was. "I...I don't think-" he started to stand, felt his knees buckling and so sat back down with a grunt. "I don't think so."

"What happened?" Kaoru inquired brusquely.

"I don't...I don't..." Touji's breath came too quickly, his hands clamped down onto the armrests and his whole body started shaking as a surge of emotion invaded his mind.

Kaoru watched this all play out without a word. He bent down and hooked a hand under Touji's arm. "Get up, Captain. You have to get up and get out of here. Understand? You need to get the S-2 reaction team up here right away. Do you under-? Hey!"

Kaoru gave Touji a slap on the cheek. Touji blinked rapidly at the pain, then visibly sharpened. "S-2. Call out the reaction team. I get ya."

Kaoru nodded and gave Touji a shove towards the elevators. "Good, now get going." He shifted the pistol into a two-handed grip and started cautiously edging down the hall, lightly stepping around blood and bodies as he went.

Touji wasn't so graceful. He stumbled and splashed his way to the elevators, keeping his balance only by hanging onto the wall for dear life. He reached the lift doors and hit the button, silently urging the elevators to hurry the hell up and get him the fuck out of there.

Just as the chime sounded and the doors slid open he felt himself hesitate. 'Something...I'm forgetting something. Important. It's very important to me...'

A door on the hall opened. "T-Touji?"

The thunderbolt. Touji turned away from the elevator and sprinted for Hikari. Gone were the weak knees and jangled nerves. Banished, like so many evil humors in the light of the sun. _His_ sun.

Hikari stood just inside her doorway. She looked down at the floor just beyond her feet. The empty eyes of a severed head looked back. Touji kicked it away and forced her back into the room.

As he shut the door there was the reverberating echo of a single gunshot.

* * *

Misato heard the screams. The gunfire. Unpleasant memories. Her first thought, with some alarm, 'Another coup?' Her second: 'Kaji. No! He would have said something!' Everything went quiet. She raised her gun at the door. It slid open with a _hiss_, and Misato felt her guts tie up into knots of revulsion.

E.V.A. Unit 257's blank face glared at her. Then it grinned at her. Misato retched a little as she saw the needled, gore- and blood-daubed teeth of the _thing_ shining in the light.

"S-Stay back!" she tried to shout. It sounded more like a squeak. "Who-Whoever's in there stay back! I'll shoot you if I have to!"

The E.V.A. growled at her.

"_Stay back!_" she shouted. 'Someone's in there. Someone _must_ be in there!' she thought. "Step out of the suit, right now! Step out and put your hands on your head!"

The E.V.A. took three quick steps into the room and dropped low into a crouch. Its mouth stretched impossibly wide, showing dozens of razored teeth, and _hissssed _at her. Misato's finger tightened on the trigger.

"Pull that trigger," Shinji softly warned, "and you will die."

Misato froze.

Shinji pushed himself up into a sitting position and kindly admired the E.V.A. "Good," he said. "You made it, Asuka."

"Asuka?" Misato burbled. "What the hell is she doing in that thing?"

"What? Oh. No. That's her name, Major." Misato was staring at him. Shinji shook his head. "Doesn't matter. Now, if you'd be so kind? Drop your weapon and kick it into some corner, would you?"

"Oh, _hell no."_

The E.V.A. bristled and took one more menacing step towards Misato.

"I'd do it quickly, too," Shinji advised. "Unless you want to make her angry."

'_This isn't angry?_' Misato eyed the E.V.A., glanced out the open door, quickly looked away. With a quick bend she set her pistol on the ground and shoved it across the room. It clattered and tumbled across the linoleum until it collided into a wall.

"Thank you," said Shinji. He turned to the E.V.A., "Asuka! Stop playing with her." The E.V.A. snarled at Misato one last time, then straightened up and assumed a less terror-inspiring look. "Now, do me a favor, Misato and release me from this bed."

Misato started to protest, but a twitch from the E.V.A. quickly convinced her that arguing would fall under the category of Bad Idea. With slow, even movements she took out her keys and unlocked the handcuffs.

Shinji released a profoundly satisfied sigh when the binders were off. "Oh, that feels good." He shooed Misato away from the bed, "Now be good and go kneel in that corner there. With your hands on your head, if you don't mind."

He waited until she did exactly as he'd asked before trying to get out of the bed. It was hard going. Between his uncontrollable shaking and the pain of muscles let gone too long without exercise, he could just barely manage to stand up. With the help of a wall. And the bed. And his E.V.A., who had to come catch him before he fell over.

"Thank you," he whispered.

The E.V.A. made no reply.

"What is that thing?" Misato asked, her courage returning as the imminent threat of death passed.

"Do you know what a dragon is?"

"...What?"

Shinji ignored her look and stroked the body of the E.V.A. tenderly, like an old friend. Or a lover. "Dragons. They're metaphors, did you know? Physical representations of overwhelming and unconquerable force. Something you cannot fight with any realistic expectation or hope for victory."

Misato snorted, "I don't care much for fairy tales. But, I do seem to remember that whenever a dragon gets into the mix it usually ends up getting killed by the hero."

The E.V.A. reacted to Shinji's touch. With a sickening sound the armor split upon itself, the plates retracting wetly to expose a slick, darkly pulsating interior. A rolling stench permeated the room. Misato gagged at the taste.

'_Blood.'_

"You're right," Shinji agreed, "most stories end with the dragon lying dead at the feet of the hero. The ones made for children, anyway. The ones given to adults are a little...different."

Coughing back some bile, Misato barely choked out a strangled, "What?"

Shinji turned his head to look at her. "You really should have read more. Most children's fables have somewhat darker origins than you might think. The dragon is killed, yes, but there's a price paid to defeat it."

"And what price is that?"

"Usually? The hero's life."

"Heh. That's a pretty shitty deal. No wonder the ending gets changed."

Shinji made a sound, not disagreeing. "The one is better reading than the other. But the lesson is lost in the translation. 'Dragons are dragons because man cannot defeat them,' as the old line goes. You need something else. Something just as implacable and unstoppable and dangerous."

Misato hesitated, sensing the answer to the unasked question. She said, "So, you need another dragon..."

Shinji shook his head. "Only if you want to kill them. To survive...to crush them, totally and implacably, you need something else." He waited a beat, hoping for something - what, he could not say. Then he turned around and backed himself into the E.V.A. It slid around him, a warm embrace. The helmet he left off. 'Just a little longer,' he begged. 'Just a little bit longer.'

Misato rose to her feet, careful to keep her hands on the back of her head. "Wait! What is it? What else do you need?"

Shinji raised his eye to the door, waiting for the deadly shadow there to answer for him.

"You need a monster, Major Katsuragi," was Kaoru Nagisa's answer. "And that's where it gets messy."

"Nagisa!" Misato dropped her hands and dipped into a fighting crouch, ready to spring at the E.V.A. "Nagisa you have to get out of here," Misato explained rapidly, her eyes locked onto Ikari and watching his every move. "Get out of here! Set off the alarm and warn the base that-"

"Please," Kaoru interrupted softly. "Be quiet."

And then he raised his service pistol and put a bullet through Misato's left eye.

* * *

The elevator was empty. 'Strange,' thought Shinji, 'I was just talking to Kensuke a moment ago.'

His shirt felt heavy. Cold. His hands, too; though they were sticky, like he'd just eaten some sloppy candy and the sugar was congealing across the skin of his fingers. Shinji looked down.

Blood. His shirt was soaked with it. His hands drenched in it. Not his blood. There was no pain. Something in his hand. A leather cord - a necklace? The hand was gripping it tightly; so tightly that it hurt. He tried to let it go, but the hand refused to obey. The thing in his hand - it was important. Important to _him._

The left hand obeyed. He used it to pry open the right.

A silver cross.

Misato's cross.

Somewhere far away, he could hear explosions.

"Shinji?"

He snapped back. Kensuke was staring at him. He looked down at his hand, dazed and confused. There was no blood. There was no cross.

"Shinji? You're starting to weird me out. Are you okay?"

Through the distance of his thoughts, Shinji heard himself say: "No, yeah, I'm fine. It's just that...Misato died."

* * *

Misato's hair lay over the pulped hole in the back of her head. There was blood everywhere; flowing over her cheek, her lips, her neck, the floor. Her eyes were still open. They were staring - not at him but at the wall, and, perhaps even beyond it.

'There's nothing there for you,' thought Shinji. 'Only the darkness unending.'

Nagisa had the pistol pointed at him, now.

"How many is that for you? Six?"

"Seven," Shinji answered.

Kaoru let out a little sigh and let the pistol drop to his side. "Why do you do this to yourself, Shinji?"

Ikari sneered at the Angel and spat back, "As if you didn't know."

Kaoru shrank at the venomous retort. Quietly, guiltily, he said, "We only wanted to help you. But instead, you murder us, and for _what?_ For this?" He twitched his pistol at the corpse lying on the floor. "For something you no longer care for or believe in?"

"I have never ceased to believe in my world."

"_Please!"_ Kaoru said scornfully. "It's obvious you no longer care for them, if you ever did. Oh, correct me if I'm wrong: but it seems evident to me that had you truly cared for our poor Major there, you would have at least attempted to stop me from killing her! But no, you let her die instead. Shot down. Like a dog."

Shinji stared at the Angel with an unflinching eye. "Perhaps it is her destiny to die."

"Ah! You say that with _such_ sincerity. I'm surprised you don't gag on the words as they come out. _DESTINY?_ You've never believed in it. Never." Kaoru was angry now, his mouth filled with a bitterness years in the fermenting. "Destiny. If you'd believed in such nonsense then none of this-this-this..._lunacy_ would ever have happened!"

The Angel shrank, his shoulders slouching and his chest deflating as the vile hatred poured out of him. In its place there came something new: a deep weariness, a crushing disappointment and a hopeless despair.

"Why did you run, Shinji?" Kaoru put a palm across his eyes, letting his skin soak up the tears pouring out. "Why did you do this to us? To me? We were friends once..."

A slight frown tugged at Shinji's lips. "That was before I knew you to be a monster."

Kaoru giggled, ran his palm down across his face, the fingertips leaving bitter streaks across his cheeks. "I'm not a monster, Shinji. I never was. None of us were. The things we did were monstrous, but deeds alone are inadequate a measure against the worth of a soul. The saintly are no saints without a greater stake in the balance. There must be faith in something deeper...a sincere belief in the achievements of the end, not the consequences of the means."

"And that makes all the misery, all the senseless and wasted deaths worthwhile?" scoffed Shinji. "I spit on your _end_, and I revile your means. I reject you, and all your ilk! And, so help me, I will oppose you until my very breath deserts me and the blood in my veins thickens and my strength fails me."

Kaoru listened to the ringing pronouncement with extreme sobriety. When Shinji was finished, he said quietly, "This is the last opportunity, old friend. If you reject us now, the consequences...the things they will send..." Kaoru struggled with himself, searching for words to describe the indescribable. "We cannot wait. The absence...it hurts us. It hurts so badly, you cannot imagine the pain."

Shinji's right eye flared. "_Can't I?_ Remember your place, _monster._ You lack but one, _I_ number billions amongst my fallen."

Kaoru made a pitiful, dismissive sound, "You scarcely knew a hundred in your life. What difference did the death of a woman in Shanghai or Omaha make? Life is not so important that it means so much to you."

"It meant something to her."

Kaoru shut his eyes, feeling the pain of truth sink home. Irrelevant. What was done was done, nothing could alter that. There was only the future, and the one piece still lacking in the design. He raised his pistol again, sighting it carefully at Shinji's face, the only flesh still exposed beneath the encompassing grip of the vile thing he wore.

"There will be no other chances. After me will come creatures both strange and incomprehensible. They have been waiting for this, for their chance to avenge themselves for a wrong they believed was right. The things they will do to you, and all you seek shelter with, will be...horrifying. This is your last chance. If you do not take it, then please, die for me. Do not countenance yourself a suffering far greater than anything me and mine might have forced on you."

"Go fuck yourself," said Shinji, his face disappearing beneath the encompassing grip of the E.V.A.'s smiling helmet.

Kaoru's finger tightened on the trigger. "So be it," he whispered. The pistol bucked in his hand, the bullet's report blasting his ears with a deafening concussion. Then another. And another.

And another.

Sirens began to wail in the distance, even as the hospital room crumbled.

* * *

AN: The second-hardest part about making this chapter was coming up with a title.

Now taking bets on who I kill next.

Musical Selection: Devotchka - How it Ends from the album: How it Ends.

For those who were wondering: the hardest part was actually writing this chapter. I seriously wrote out the last section a month before I wrote everything else. Hell, I wrote this Author's Note before I even finished the chapter! Seriously - this one was a bitch.


End file.
